New Charges Against DeLay
Media Blog
Stephen Spruiell Reporting
I just got off the phone with a law clerk in the office of Bill White, an attorney representing DeLay. Here's what I learned about the new indictment:
1. DeLay's legal team anticipated it. The original indictment would have been thrown out of court because the conspiracy law DeLay was accused of breaking did not apply to the election code in 2002. DeLay's legal team had already filed a motion to dismiss, which has not yet been ruled on because the judge is on vacation.
2. The original indictment was for conspiracy to violate the election code. This would not have held up in court (see 1). The new indictment, issued by a new grand jury, charges DeLay with conspiracy to commit money laundering. It also alleges that DeLay committed money laundering.
3. The new indictment centers around the same transaction as the old one: a transfer of $190,000 in corporate money from DeLay's Texas for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC) to the Republican National State Elections Committee (RNSEC), which sent checks totaling approximately the same amount to Texas House candidates in October of 2002. Earle alleged that this constituted money laundering, because the money that TRMPAC sent to RNSEC came from corporations, which are barred from contributing to campaigns in Texas.
4. The new charges are just as flimsy as the old ones. Earle does not provide any new evidence in the indictment tying DeLay to the money transfer, but he doesn't have to show his hand until the trial.
5. Not only does Earle have to prove that DeLay knew about or facilitated the transaction, he also has to prove that the transaction constituted money laundering as defined by the Texas penal code. That's a stretch, considering that prior to the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (McCain-Feingold), both parties engaged in this kind of soft-money for hard-money swap all the time for the purposes of funding state races. As I have noted here before, the Texas Democratic Party sent $75,000 to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and received $75,000 back from the DNC on the same day. In fact, Democrats transferred a total of approximately $11 million dollars from their national parties to fund Texas campaigns in 2002, compared to $5.2 million transferred by Republicans. At the national level, corporate soft money and personal hard dollars were fungible before McCain-Feingold took effect after the 2002 elections.
6. Ronnie Earle is abusing campaign-finance law to further his own agenda. The transactions that DeLay is accused of knowing about and facilitating are not commonly thought of as illegal transactions. But Ronnie Earle thinks they are wrong, and he thinks that he can convince a judge and a jury that Tom DeLay ought to be punished for his wrongdoing — even though it is pretty clear that he did not violate the law. We are about to find out if he is right.
UPDATE: Instapundit has a smart take on preventing this kind of abuse in the future:
"Conspiracy and money laundering are vague crimes, easy
to allege, hard to prove, and often used by overreaching
prosecutors who want to put heat on someone. One would
hope that Delay's legal problems would encourage other
legislators to tighten up statutes and reduce
prosecutorial discretion on such matters, but I suspect
that such hopes would be in vain."
UPDATE II: This is what Tom DeLay is charged with:
Texas Penal Code Sec. 34.02: Money Laundering
(a) A person commits an offense if the person knowingly:
(1) acquires or maintains an interest in, receives, conceals, possesses, transfers, or transports the proceeds of criminal activity;
(2) conducts, supervises, or facilitates a transaction involving the proceeds of criminal activity; or
(3) invests, expends, or receives, or offers to invest, expend, or receive, the proceeds of criminal activity or funds that the person believes are the proceeds of criminal activity.
The "criminal activity" in this case would be the expenditure of corporate funds in Texas state legislative campaigns. In order to convict DeLay of conspiracy, Earle has to prove that DeLay knew pretty much all the details of the transaction. In order to convict on the money-laundering charge, Earle would have to show that DeLay "supervised or facilitated" the transaction. In order to convict on either, Earle has to prove that the transaction related to the proceeds of a criminal activity.
UPDATE III: Krempasky compares the old indictment to the new one:
"Ok - so are we to believe that Earle found new evidence
in the last four days? Or just a new set of eyes that had
watched all the media hysteria?"
AP story here
breitbart.com
media.nationalreview.com
instapundit.com
redstate.org |
