Still no word from Dan Coats about why his lobbying disclosure statements that have him lobbying for TARP/Bailout money don’t mean he was lobbying to get his client TARP/Bailout money.
Coats is now railing against TARP and all federal bailouts. At the time, he was working for the private equity fund Cerberus Capital Management, owner of Chrysler, trying to get bailout money.
But his campaign insists he was actually “advocat[ing] for small businesses” on Cerberus’s dime.
Late Update: A bit more on what’s going on here. As noted in Eric Kleefeld’s piece from Friday, which I linked above, we’ve had several back and forths with the Coats’ campaign on this subject. So I wanted to review that just to have all the facts on the table. The lobbying disclosure form says that Coats lobbied TARP on behalf of Cerberus, which was then the owner of Chrysler, a prime target of bailout funds. However, Chrysler is not explicitly mentioned as the target of the lobbying. Coats’ campaign says that notwithstanding the language of the disclosure form, Coats’ was not lobbying for TARP funds or even for Cerberus for that matter but rather for provisions that would help small businesses. Now, what’s never been clear to us is what interest Cerberus (a very large private equity investor) would have in helping small businesses. We’ve posed this question to the Coats’ campaign and have been told that that is all the information they can provide. Any other questions, they say, should be taken to Cerberus. But they have not replied to our requests for comment.
