Franken requests certificate
Posted: Monday, January 12, 2009 5:30 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC's Abby Livingston
If the Franken campaign was looking to rile up the Team Coleman, it succeeded today.
Earlier, the Franken campaign sent a letter to Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty and Secretary of State Mark Ritchie requesting that Franken be certified the winner of the Minnesota Senate seat recount race.
Franken attorneys wrote of what they saw as an inevitable Franken certification, and concluded, “Now that the recount is complete and the new Congress has convened, state law does not provide for further delay, and federal law requires that the certificate issue. Accordingly, we request respectfully that Mr. Franken’s election be certified by the close of business today.”
Despite that rhetoric, by far, the sharpest dig in the letter was a "cc:" to “Senator-Elect Al Franken.”
In a move that showed that there is at least one Republican and Democrat in Minnesota on the same page, Pawlenty and Ritchie declined the request. Regardless, on a conference call this afternoon, the Coleman campaign referred to Ritchie as “Franken-friendly.”
Later in the day, the Coleman camp returned fire with a letter of its own, stating, “As you have both recognized, there is no legal basis for this request, and we applaud your subsequent refusal to issue a certificate of election that Mr. Franken has not legally secured or obtained.”
The letter went on to call the Franken move “audacious,” an “end-run,” an “attempt to short circuit judicial investigation,” and the Coleman camp viewed it with “amazement.”
