Landrieu and Cassidy Sling Mud About Respective Scandals in Final Debate

— -- In the one and only debate before Louisiana’s runoff election, set for Dec. 6, Sen. Mary Landrieu and her GOP challenger Rep. Bill Cassidy sparred over which candidate has committed the greater crime.

While Landrieu made the case that Cassidy has padded his own payroll at the expense of the poor patients who he was supposed to help as a part-time professor of medicine at LSU, Cassidy batted back that Landrieu caused greater harm with her use of taxpayer funds to charter flights to campaign events.

“My opponent has told us he is a doctor for the poor, but he is not a doctor for the poor, he’s a doctor for himself,” said Landrieu, who sought to distinguish her misuse of taxpayer funds on campaign related expenses – a mishap revealed earlier this year, which Landrieu has since corrected by reimbursing the misspent funds – as a book-keeping error compared to what she said was an intentional lack of record-keeping on Cassidy’s part.

“One was a book-keeping error, which I took full responsibility and turned over a complete set of records … and the other is a situation of a congressman whose take $20,000 a year in addition to his Congressional salary, and it may be even more than that if they paid for his medical malpractice insurance, without reporting it properly, without handing over any records.”

Landrieu, who is widely considered the underdog headed into Saturday’s election, repeatedly called on Cassidy to release the full records of his 63 months working at LSU to supplement the 16 months of time sheets that were made public in a surprise document release a week ago. But Cassidy said Landrieu is the one who needs to be more forthcoming with voters.

“If what Sen. Landrieu wants is transparency, then I’ll ask the question: When I treat patients in the public hospital system, clearly those patients benefit. When she takes chartered jets on taxpayer dime to campaign events, who is it that benefits?” Cassidy said.

Just hours before the debate began Monday night, LSU announced that it would conduct “a review” of Cassidy’s employment with the university.

“Based on concerns that have surfaced in the news media, we will review any information we have regarding Dr. Bill Cassidy's employment with LSU, just as we would any other employee,” LSU Director of Media Relations Ernie Ballard told ABC News in a statement.

Cassidy, who has been on a leave of absence from LSU since April, defended his work as a part-time professor in the debate and called the allegations that he was paid for work he didn’t do “false.”

“These charges are false and my direct supervisor and I have made numerous statements regarding this,” Cassidy said. “The work I’ve done working with LSU, teaching medical students, actually benefits the poor and uninsured. There’s an irony here: Sen. Landrieu justifies her vote for Obamacare, it would not have passed without her, by saying she’s for the poor and uninsured, even though demonstrably Obamacare has hurt the economic prospects of the poor.”

Another heated exchange in the debate was on whether race relations have improved in the United States over the last several decades.