Lungren Received $87,608 From Insurance Firms : Campaign gifts: Prop. 103 author accuses him of corruption. The attorney general calls the charges ‘dirt.’

The author of Proposition 103 released documents Wednesday showing that Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren has accepted more than $87,000 in campaign contributions from insurance companies over the last 15 years, most of it in the last 18 months.

Harvey Rosenfield said he believes that Lungren is trying to undermine the legal defense of Proposition 103 insurance rebates because of those contributions.

“Those who claim contributions are benign are wrong,” Rosenfield said at a Los Angeles news conference, where he revealed that $64,550 of the $87,608 in contributions came within the last 18 months, both before and after Lungren was elected attorney general.

“I view them as bribery, extortion and corruption,” Rosenfield said.

Lungren, responding in an interview, said the charges are “dirt and diversion.”

“Harvey Rosenfield seems to find a conspiracy against consumers under every bed,” the attorney general said. “He ought to grow up and understand that just because people disagree with him doesn’t mean they’re corrupt. He may, in fact, be wrong on occasion.”

As for the $87,608 in insurer contributions, Lungren said: “You know politics. That is not a very large sum in 15 years, and I have a reputation for being independent. . . . No one has ever accused me of genuflecting to interests because they give money.”

In fact, Lungren said, he supports the $2.5 billion in rebates that Insurance Commissioner John Garamendi has said he will order.

“I’ve got two teen-age sons driving,” Lungren said. “I hope to get some rebates too. I’m a consumer too. I want the best break I can get from these companies.”

Rosenfield’s and Lungren’s comments were the latest set-to in arguments that have shuttled the length of the state over who will represent Garamendi in an anticipated court fight over rebates.

Lungren said he has concluded that the $195-an-hour, $750,000 contract Garamendi signed to retain two outside attorneys to defend Proposition 103 was illegally negotiated.

On Tuesday, Garamendi had accused Lungren of “carrying the ball down the field for the insurance industry” in the matter. He asked a San Francisco court to stop Lungren from interfering with his selection of attorneys Michael Strumwasser and Fred Woocher, who once worked for Lungren’s predecessor, Atty. Gen. John K. Van de Kamp.

On Wednesday, Rosenfield demanded that Lungren release “records of all correspondence, meetings and telephone calls between himself and insurance industry executives concerning Proposition 103 and specifically his effort to block Garamendi from retaining (the) lawyers.”

Lungren insisted that insurers had had minimal input on the attorney issue, and said he had not known about the dispute until it was brought to his attention by a civil servant in a memo.

But Rosenfield said he has been told that an insurance industry representative prepared the memo, and gave it to a civil servant who later passed it on to Lungren.

“I didn’t go looking for this fight or dispute,” Lungren remarked Wednesday. He said he is willing to let Garamendi hire Strumwasser and Woocher as Insurance Department staff attorneys, which would be cheaper, and he offered to waive rules against staff attorneys representing the department in court.

He also said he could have tried to cancel the two lawyers’ contract, which expires in September, but he did not.

Garamendi aides insisted Wednesday that there are no vacancies to hire the two, and in any case, they could not be brought into the civil service at a high enough level to pay them a fair salary.