Tom DeLay, the former Republican congressional leader known as “The Hammer” for his brass-knuckles style, was convicted Wednesday of criminally crossing the line into dirty politics.
A Texas jury found DeLay guilty of one charge of laundering corporate money into political donations and one charge of conspiracy. He could face a lengthy prison term for the conviction.
The former House majority leader vowed to appeal the ruling and said he hoped he would be able to get his case heard by “people that understand the law.”
“This is an abuse of power, and it is a miscarriage of justice,” he told reporters.
“I still maintain that I am innocent, that the criminalization of politics undermines our very system, and I’m very disappointed in the outcome.”
Prosecutors argued that DeLay, once among the most powerful Republicans in the US Congress, schemed to influence the Texas elections in 2002 to tighten his grip on his leadership post.
The defense painted DeLay as a hands-off manager who did not know what his associates were doing and argued that no laws were broken.
At the heart of the case was one transaction: DeLay’s political committee in Texas sent 190,000 dollars of corporate donations to the Republican National Committee, which in turn donated the same amount to seven Texas candidates supported by DeLay in the 2002 mid-term election.
Texas law prohibits corporate giving to candidates.
The pivotal contest became the first step in DeLay’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional districts and tighten his grip on the leadership post by enlarging the Republican majority in Congress.
By 2004 DeLay had accomplished all of that, but a year later a Texas grand jury handed up the felony indictments on charges of money laundering and conspiracy and DeLay was forced to resign as House majority leader.
He retired from Congress, after 22 years, in the middle of his re-election bid in 2006.
DeLay declined to take the stand in his defense, but the case still turned on his words.
DeLay made a last-minute bid to save his political career by meeting with prosecutors in 2005 and the taped interview provided the most dramatic moment of the trial.
DeLay told prosecutors that he knew that Jim Ellis, DeLay’s chief political aide in Washington, was going to exchange 190,000 dollars of corporate money for campaign donations from the Republican National Committee.
“Jim Ellis told me he was going to do it,” DeLay said. “Before he did it?” prosecutors asked. “Uh-huh,” DeLay answered.
But DeLay also told prosecutors that he made no decisions about the money swap, assumed it was legal, did not talk to RNC officials about it and knew few details.
DeLay said he knew only that Ellis “was going to take 190,000 dollars and take it to the RNC and exchange it for hard money.”
DeLay said when Ellis told him about it, he just said, “Fine.”
This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php
Five Filters featured article: Beyond Hiroshima - The Non-Reporting of Falluja's Cancer Catastrophe.
No comments:
Post a Comment