CNN’s Lou Dobbs led his broadcast tonight with the story about the arrest warrant issued for Tom DeLay, choosing to play that angle up without mentioning that Ronnie Earle cannot produce the most important piece of evidence listed in his indictments. CNN’s lead graphic was a wanted poster with DeLay’s picture on it.

CNN missed several opportunities to inform its viewers about a major development in the story that occurred last week when DeLay’s co-defendants demanded that Ronnie Earle produce a document that he had referenced in each indictment that supposedly proved that money sent from Texas to the RNC was meant to be sent back in the form of seven checks to Texas House candidates. Earle could not produce the document. He instead claimed that he had a “factually related” document that listed 17 candidates, not seven, but that had no author or date on it. CNN political analyst Bill Schneider could have informed CNN viewers about the missing evidence — it would have been a first for CNN. But instead he compared Earle’s prosecution of DeLay to the U.S. military “decapitation strike” against Saddam Hussein.

To Dobbs’ credit, he spent the last minute or so of the report talking with legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, who reported that Earle actually had a choice of whether or not to issue an arrest warrant for DeLay. In white-collar cases in Texas, lawyers can usually work out a surrender agreement that avoids an arrest warrant. Earle issued a warrant because he knew the media would hype it up. But I doubt even Earle imagined that a national news network would put DeLay on a wanted poster. That was CNN’s special touch.

Video here.