Yesterday I linked to an article about Travis County DA Ronnie Earle’s failure to produce a key piece of evidence in his prosecution of DeLay associates John Colyandro (former director of DeLay’s Texas for a Republican Majority PAC) and Jim Ellis (director of DeLay’s Americans for a Republican Majority PAC). DeLay is charged with facilitating a so-called money-laundering scheme that allegedly involved all three men. Here’s how I summarized the charges in this article for NR’s print edition:

Earle also singled out a transaction that involved TRMPAC, the Republican National State Elections Committee (RNSEC), and seven Republican candidates for the Texas legislature. In September 2002, TRMPAC sent a check for $190,000 in soft-money (corporate) donations to RNSEC, where lawyers and accountants put it in a separate account for corporate money. Corporate money cannot go to state elections in Texas, but it can go to elections in states like California or Virginia. RNSEC then sent checks from separate hard-money accounts totaling approximately the same amount to the Texas candidates the following October. Earle alleged that, taken together, these legal transactions constituted illegal money laundering