I thought DeLay was going down when this indictment broke. Not any more.
No Author, No Date on Ronnie Earle's Faux Evidence
Media Blog
Stephen Spruiell Reporting
Press Patterns
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 — a first-degree felony — because the effect was to circumvent the ban on corporate money. Earle’s case rests on his allegation that TRMPAC sent a document along with the checks directing RNSEC to distribute the money to the Texas candidates. TRMPAC lawyers say that doesn’t matter, because the transactions were legal.
That document — which has been referenced in all the indictments of Ellis, Colyandro and DeLay — is the same one Earle failed to produce last week when lawyers for Ellis and Colyandro filed a motion demanding to see it. Instead, the Houston Chronicle reported that prosecutors on Earle's team said in court that they only had a "similar" list. They said that the list they had was a precursor to the document referenced in the indictments.
The Houston Chronicle reported that this so-called precursor list, which the DA acquired from a sweeping request for TRMPAC documents, mentions 17 candidates, not seven. The Chronicle also reported that the dollar amounts on the list totaled $230,000, not $190,000.
I spoke with John Colyandro this afternoon, and he gave me additional details about this so-called precursor list that further call into question its admissibility as evidence. First, the list has no date on it. The prosecution's case depends on proving that the list to the RNC around the time that the money transactions were taking place.
Second, the list has no author. It's just a copy of a printout of an Excel spreadsheet with candidates and dollar amounts on it — candidates and dollar amounts, I remind you, that do not add up to seven or $190,000. How can Earle prove this list was even authored by Colyandro, or whether Ellis or DeLay even knew about it?
The answer, according to the Chronicle report, depends on the testimony of former RNC deputy director Terry Nelson — the alleged recipient of the list. And as J.D. Pauerstein, a lawyer for Ellis, told the Chronicle, "...the jury could weigh the testimony and decide whether to accept it or whether he's confused about what list he saw three or four years ago in the midst of a heated election cycle."
Ronnie Earle clearly doesn't have a case. So what's his goal in bringing charges that are bound to be thrown out? Some have argued that Earle is a partisan, just going after Republicans, but Colyandro thinks Byron York might be closer to the mark with his reports on Ronnie Earle's zealous beliefs about the evil of corporate money in campaigns.
"The problem isn't partisanship," Colyandro told me. "The real problem is that the district attorney is a zealot with an agenda and his agenda is to change the law. If you look at the sum total of the evidence and the statutes under which we're indicted, it becomes clear that he's wrong on the law. But if he can create a public outrage that can result in a change in the law, that's one of his objectives."
Where's the press pattern? The media were so eager to wrap the investigation of DeLay into an overall narrative of GOP decline and collapse that they didn't look at the facts and the law. As the motives of this district attorney become clear and the case against DeLay and his associates weakens, the media shifts its attention to Rove and Libby. Aside from the occasional potshot, the DeLay indictment is vanishing from the national media — especially when the news, like the Chronicle report yesterday, is so embarrassing for Ronnie Earle.
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