MinnPost/Raoul Benavides

Rep. Michele Bachmann

The Wednesday indictment of Frank Vennes Jr. in the Tom Petters ponzi scheme is at least somewhat embarrassing to both of Minnesota’s Repub presidential candidates.

Vennes and members of his family gave tens of thousands of dollars in total to the campaigns of former Gov. Tim Pawlenty and U.S. Rep Michele Bachmann. Bachmann and Pawlenty subsequently asked then-President George W. Bush to pardon Vennes.

Now before you get all excited, there are a few things about the Bachmann-Pawlenty-Vennes (also former Sen. Norm Coleman) connection that you need to know before deciding just how embarrassed they need to be:

• However awkward/suspicious the timing may be, there is no evidence in the public record that the politicians’ support for Vennes’ presidential pardon was a quid pro quo for the donations they received from the felon and his family.
• The pardon in question was not in connection with the Petters scandal and would not have gotten Vennes out of prison even if  Bush had granted it. Vennes had already been paroled for the earlier crimes and his application for a pardon was an effort only to clear his record.
• Bachmann, who wrote a truly ardent letter about the additional good that Vennes would be able to do for society’s “neediest” if he was pardoned, subsequently withdrew her pardon endorsement after Vennes’ name surfaced in the Petters case (but well before he was indicted). In her second letter she confessed that “regrettably, it now appears that I may have too hastily accepted [Vennes’] claims of redemption.” Bachmann gave away some of the money she had received from the Vennes family.

“Rep. Bachmann has remained disassociated from Mr. Vennes and is saddened by the charges that were filed against him Wednesday,” said her spokester, Doug Sachtleben, in an email.

It’s not clear whether Pawlenty ever retracted his endorsement of Vennes’ pardon application or gave to charity any of the money he received from the Vennes family in his 2002 or 2006 campaigns for governor. Pawlenty’s spokester did not respond Thursday to questions about the Vennes pardon.

The background
According to the evidence from his first brush with the law, Vennes was a Bismarck pawnshop owner in the 1980s when undercover federal agents were steered to Vennes as a guy who knew how to launder ill-gotten money. For a sizeable commission, he arranged to illegally park hundreds of thousands of dollars in the Bahamas, the Isle of Man and Switzerland in violation of federal currency laws. He also told the agents that his associates had lost or stolen $100,000 of the money.

In May 1987, Vennes was indicted on money laundering charges, to which he pled guilty, plus gun and drug charges, to which he pled no contest. (He later tried to withdraw the pleas but the courts rejected the request.) He was sentenced to five years at Sandstone Prison in northern Minnesota and served three, during which time, he later told the Star Tribune, he turned his life over to God.

Photo by Bill Kelley

Tom Petters

After his release, Vennes started or ran several businesses, became wealthy, built homes in Minnesota and Florida. A substantial part of his wealth came from steering investors to Petters. The government says Vennes made more than $105 million in commissions.

He also became active in several philanthropies, many of them Christian organizations, including Minnesota Teen Challenge, an evangelical Christian program that helps young addicts, gang members and prostitutes go straight. Pawlenty and Bachmann, both evangelical Christians, took an interest in MTC. Vennes gave very generously to the group, as did Petters. Vennes served on the board alongside Pawlenty’s wife, Mary.

With Vennes on its board, Teen Challenge is believed to have invested more than $5 million down the rat hole that was the Petters empire. The Strib’s story about Tuesday’s indictment of Vennes says the feds have tape recordings, secretly made by a Petters aide, in which Vennes says that if the fraud is discovered, he and and Petters will be jointly implicated.

Vennes also took an interest in the political careers of Pawlenty, Bachmann, Coleman and Sen. Amy Klobuchar. (Unlike the first three named, Klobuchar apparently never aided Vennes’ pardon campaign.)

Bachmann’s back and forth on Vennes
Karl Bremer of Stillwater, who has written both for the Dump Bachmann blog and for his own blog called Ripple in Stillwater, has been following this saga, especially the Bachmann-Vennes connection, for years. His findings were summarized at the bottom of this Dump Bachmann piece covering the Vennes indictment. Bremer says Vennes and his family members donated $27,400 to Bachmann’s campaigns between 2005-2008.

Bachmann’s letter to U.S. Pardon Attorney Rodger Adams advocating a presidential pardon for Vennes, written on official congressional stationery, is dated Dec. 10, 2007.

In it, she argues that Vennes doesn’t need the pardon for his own benefit, since “by the grace of God,” he has already prospered since getting out of prison. But the pardon will actually benefit society, she wrote, because of Vennes’ philanthropic work.

“Why does Mr. Vennes need a pardon if he is so successful?” Bachmann asks rhetorically in the letter. “So he can help more people than he does. Despite his success, Mr. Vennes still encounters the barriers of his past and especially in the area of finance loan documents. This hinders his ability to expand his business which places limits on the support to the neediest in society.”

Nine months later, the feds raided Vennes’ homes as part of the Petters probe. A week after that, Bachmann wrote a second letter to the pardon attorney, withdrawing her first letter

A pdf of that letter, as obtained by the Minnesota Independent, is viewable here.

Bachmann  tried to donate $9,200 – apparently representing the amount she had received from the Vennes family in the 2007-08 campaign cycle -- to Minnesota Teen Challenge on Oct. 3, 2008, but Teen Challenge refused to accept the money. According to Bremer’s reporting, Bachmann solved that problem by giving the sum to a related charity.

The Coleman-Pawlenty-Vennes piece
Pawlenty apparently did not directly request a pardon for Vennes, but Coleman, in his letter, wrote that Pawlenty (also then MNGOP Chair Ron Eibensteiner) joined him in recommending a Vennes pardon.

AP Photo/Jim Mone

Norm Coleman

The Coleman letter (full text here) is dated Dec. 20, 2002, after Coleman had won his Senate race but before he was sworn in. (Pawlenty, also, was governor-elect at the time.) Coleman’s letter (addressed to Bush, c/o Karl Rove) is a little less gushy than Bachmann’s, but it also says that Vennes is “known for his integrity and fine character,” and that “Frank is indeed an example of successful rehabilitation.”

In conclusion, Coleman writes, “I want to join my friend, Ron Eibensteiner and Governor-Elect Tim Pawlenty in urging President Bush to grant Frank Vennes a Presidential Pardon.”

It’s not clear to me whether Coleman was following up on pardon-urging letters that he believed Pawlenty and Eibensteiner had already written, or whether he had their permission to include their recommendation in his letter. Pawlenty has been asked about this but has never clarified. I asked it again yesterday but never heard back from Pawlenty’s spokester. I do assume that if Pawlenty had nothing to do with requesting a pardon for Vennes, he would have said so by now.

According to Bremer’s reporting, Pawlenty’s 2002 campaign got $2,000 each from four members of the family and $2,000 each from six family members heading into his 2006 reelection campaign.

Members of the family also contributed to Coleman and to the MNGOP when Eibensteiner was chair and afterwards.

Coleman did respond to my question yesterday, as follows:

"Frank Vennes earned the appreciation of many, including myself, based on the work he did with Teen Challenge. I am not privy to, or aware of, what role he may have played in the Petters saga. My advocacy for Frank nearly a decade ago pre-dated anything I am aware of that had to do with Tom Petters.

“Although he is entitled to a presumption of innocence, his indictment today raises troubling and serious questions about his conduct that took place after many, including myself, advocated on his behalf for the positive work he had done."

MinnPost Washington Correspondent Derek Wallbank contributed to this post.