WASHINGTON – House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was indicted by a Texas grand jury Wednesday on a charge of conspiring to violate political fundraising laws, forcing him to temporarily step aside from his GOP post. He is the highest-ranking member of Congress to face criminal prosecution.
| The next step in the criminal proceedings against Republican leader Rep. Tom DeLay is a trip to Austin, Texas, to be fingerprinted and photographed. DeLay’s attorneys were working out the details of when the 11-term congressman would return to Texas in hopes of saving him from further embarrassment, they said. A bond amount would be set beforehand so Delay could immediately pay it and avoid going to jail. |
A defiant DeLay said he had done nothing wrong and denounced the Democratic prosecutor who pursued the case as a “partisan fanatic.” He said, “This is one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history. It’s a sham.”
Nonetheless, DeLay’s temporary departure and the prospect of a criminal trial for one of the Republicans’ most visible leaders reverberated throughout the GOP-run Congress, which was already struggling with ethics questions surrounding its Senate leader.
Republicans quickly moved to fill the void, while voicing polite support for DeLay. Speaker Dennis Hastert named Missouri Rep. Roy Blunt to take over most of DeLay’s leadership duties.
Ronnie Earle, the Democratic prosecutor in Austin who led the investigation, denied politics was involved. “Our job is to prosecute abuses of power and to bring those abuses to the public,” he said. He has noted previously that he has prosecuted many Democrats in the past.
DeLay, 58, was indicted on a single felony count of conspiring with two political associates. The two previously had been charged with the same conspiracy count. They are John Colyandro, former executive director of a Texas political action committee formed by DeLay, and Jim Ellis, who heads DeLay’s national political committee.
The indictment stems from a plan DeLay helped set in motion in 2001 to help Republicans win control of the Texas House in the 2002 elections for the first time since Reconstruction.
The grand jury accused the men of conspiring to route corporate donations from DeLay’s Texas committee to the Republican Party in Washington, then returning the money back to Texas legislative candidates. It was a scheme intended to evade a state law outlawing corporate donations going to candidates, the indictment said.
DeLay and others conspired to “engage in conduct that would constitute the offense of knowingly making a political contribution in violation” of Texas law, the indictment charged. However, it did not specify how DeLay was involved.
DeLay, whose conduct on separate issues was criticized by the House ethics committee last year, was unrelenting in his criticism of Earle. He suggested the district attorney had promised not to prosecute him and then changed course under pressure from Democrats and criticism from a newspaper in Texas.
However, the grand jury’s foreman, William Gibson, said Earle didn’t pressure members to indict DeLay. “Ronnie Earle didn’t indict him. The grand jury indicted him,” Gibson said.
By any measure, DeLay’s indictment was historic. A Senate historian, Donald Ritchie, said after researching the subject, “There’s never been a member of Congress in a leadership position who has been indicted.”
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