Power Outage: DeLay's indictment upends the Republicans' to-do list

[johnfunk]

TIME reports that the investigation into Abramoff "has begun lapping at the edges of the former majority leader's operation."

Power Outage
House leader Tom DeLay's indictment upends the Republicans' to-do list and their outlook for next year's elections. Can they recover in time?
By KAREN TUMULTY AND MIKE ALLEN

The news that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay had been dreading for months was brought by an aide, who interrupted DeLay's weekly lunch with Dennis Hastert in the House Speaker's office. DeLay absorbed it, and then the man widely called "the Hammer" on Capitol Hill (though rarely to his face) did what he does best: he hit back. "All right," DeLay replied. "Let's go. Let's go fight." Less than three hours later, before a roomful of reporters, DeLay addressed a Texas grand jury's charge that he and two political associates conspired to funnel $155,000 in illegal corporate campaign contributions into Texas legislative races. He called it "one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history" and the prosecutor who brought the case "a partisan fanatic." That night, anxious to show he's not a recluse, he introduced Rudy Giuliani at a Friends of Israel banquet. DeLay even made an uncharacteristic round of the cable shows, hinting darkly on cnn that he would soon produce "very good evidence" that his nemesis, Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle, had engaged in a conspiracy of his own--"with the Democratic leadership here in Washington."

...

DeLay may not have seen the worst of it yet. Sources tell TIME that while Earle was closing in on DeLay from Austin, Texas, a federal investigation into the spreading scandal around disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, accused with Michael Scanlon (a former press secretary of DeLay's) of bilking their Indian-tribe clients out of $66 million, has begun lapping at the edges of the former majority leader's operation. A former Abramoff associate who was questioned by the FBI in August says, "They had a lot of e-mails, a lot of traffic between our office and DeLay's office." Many of those exchanges involved lavish travel by DeLay arranged by the lobbyist but requested, the e-mails suggest, by aides in DeLay's office. (House members are allowed to accept gifts under limited circumstances but not to solicit them.) Says the source: "There was nothing I saw that hit DeLay personally, but there was a lot of questionable stuff that was going on with his staff. 'Tom wants this. Tom wants that.' Was it really him or just the staff that was being aggressive?" DeLay's office wouldn't comment on the Justice Department investigation, and neither would the FBI.

Looks like we're in for some real fun. Grab the popcorn...:popcorn:

[Child_Of_Isis]

1. he hit back

I think they meant to say "he whined".