Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle’s team must have decided it was losing the PR war in the case against Tom DeLay. A front-page story in the Washington Post today appears to be based almost entirely on anonymous sources from inside Earle’s office. These sources picked a friendly reporter and leaked as much damaging information as they could in an effort to make the case against DeLay appear solid. Yet by the end of the piece, I was shaking my head and asking, “Is that really all they’ve got?”
The story leads with the most damaging stuff:
Lawyers for Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) tried unsuccessfully in late September to head off felony criminal indictments against the then-majority leader on charges of violating Texas campaign law by signaling that DeLay might plead guilty to a misdemeanor, according to four sources familiar with the events.
Honestly, so what? DeLay attorney Dick DeGuerin has already said that DeLay turned down a plea bargain Earle offered. Later in the story, when the plea deal is put into context, it looks a lot less like DeLay’s lawyers were desperate and more like the other way around.
The last-minute negotiations between the lawyers and Texas prosecutor Ronnie Earle were arranged after DeLay made what Earle considered a seriously damaging admission about his fundraising activities during an Aug. 17 meeting with the prosecutor in Austin.
At that session, DeLay acknowledged that in 2002 he was informed about and expressed his support for transfers of $190,000 in mostly corporate funds from his Texas political action committee to an arm of the Republican National Committee in Washington and then back to Texas, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition that they not be named.
Once again, DeLay’s “admission” was put into context later in the story:
According to matching accounts provided separately by the sources, DeLay was asked whether such a deal happened and responded yes. Asked if he knew beforehand that the deal was going to happen, DeLay said yes. Asked how he knew, DeLay said that his longtime political adviser, Ellis, came into his office, told him it was planned and asked DeLay what he thought. DeLay told Earle that he recalled saying, “Fine.” He added that he knew it was corporate money but said it was fine because he thought it was legal.
There’s a lot of room for DeLay to be confused about what he was being asked. DeLay was not under oath at the time, and he was apparently “relaxed and garrulous.”
But even if he admitted to knowing about the transactions — even if he masterminded the whole deal — it doesn’t matter because DeLay was right: The transactions were legal.
But this is the key paragraph:
Sources said [the case against DeLay] is based so far almost entirely on DeLay’s admissions to Earle and his subsequent statements in media interviews about the money transfers. To date, Earle has not gathered compelling testimony from other witnesses or found documents that portray DeLay as the mastermind of the $190,000 transfers, they added.
Not only that, but as I reported here and here, Earle couldn’t produce the one piece of substantial evidence cited in the indictments when DeLay’s co-defendants demanded that Earle produce it in court.
Earle has no substantial evidence tying DeLay to a transaction that wasn’t illegal in the first place. We know this because we have every reason to believe that leakers from Earle’s office just made their best case to the Washington Post, and the resulting report concluded as much.
But here’s the kicker: None of this matters, because the damage has already been done. Without DeLay as Majority Leader, the GOP leadership in the U.S. House of Representatives can’t even find their car keys, much less pass a badly needed deficit-reduction bill, because DeLay isn’t around to whip the GOP into line. Like I said, it doesn’t matter that Ronnie Earle brought his case without so much as a single shred of solid proof. The indictment was the finish line.
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