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Dems dont press repubs on illegal activity { May 28 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.thehill.com/marshall/052803.aspxhttp://www.thehill.com/marshall/052803.aspx
MAY 28, 2003
JOSH MARSHALL
Just what did DeLay know about the Dems’ Texas plane?
At 34, I thought it’d be a while longer before I’d have to say that I hailed from a bygone era. But in my day, if a House majority leader was directly involved in a scandal that triggered a potentially criminal investigation at one cabinet department, an administrative review at another, and a grand jury investigation in his home state, he’d be in some trouble. Members of the opposition party might even push to get to the bottom of it.
Luckily for Tom DeLay, though, times change.
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Tim Russert asked his panel about the growing list of revelations about the Texas Republican’s efforts to enlist federal law enforcement — and other federal agencies — in helping him settle a political fight back home in Texas.
In response, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) said, “I don’t know enough to comment on that. I mean I just don’t know what happened there. I’m just not qualified to comment.” Sens. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) cracked a couple of jokes and left it at that.
Either Biden is shamelessly indifferent to a possible abuse of office by the second-ranking Republican in the House or he was just terribly briefed. So, on the assumption that it was the latter and not the former, let me try to bring Biden up to speed.
As everyone now knows, a couple weeks ago, most Democrats in the Texas state House ran off to neighboring Oklahoma to avoid a vote on a DeLay-designed redistricting bill. Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick ordered the Department of Public Safety (DPS) to arrest the runaway Democrats and bring them back to Austin.
State troopers from the DPS eventually roped the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into the manhunt. By tricking them into thinking they were searching for a missing or crashed plane, the DPS got Homeland Security to help track down the airplane of former Texas Speaker Peter Laney (D), whom they suspected of helping ferry Democratic legislators out of the state.
That’s where things stood when I wrote about this last week.
Then last Thursday, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge declined to release the transcripts of conversations between the Texas DPS and his department because, he said, his department’s internal inquiry was “potentially a criminal investigation.”
The scope of the potential wrong-doing further expanded when it was revealed that the DPS had ordered all its records of the manhunt destroyed on May 14. A grand jury in Austin is now investigating what laws the DPS might have violated by destroying those documents.
Given Ridge’s revelations, few now doubt that people at the DPS and probably some pols in Texas got their hands dirty either in bamboozling Homeland Security or by covering up the bamboozlement after the fact. The big question has been whether DeLay was directly involved in this part of the caper.
DeLay’s spokesmen had insisted that he played no role in the manhunt other than passing on to the Justice Department Craddick’s request for federal law enforcement help in arresting the Democratic legislators.
Then last Thursday, DeLay took the opportunity to, shall we say, revise and extend his remarks.
DeLay conceded that a staffer in his office contacted the FAA to find out the whereabouts of Laney’s plane and received information on its location and flight plan. (DeLay first said this information was available to the public on the FAA website; the next day his office conceded that this was not the case.) He then passed that information on to Tom Craddick.
In other words, we now know that DeLay was personally involved in the effort to track down Laney’s plane. The chain of events went something like this:
Early on May 12, DeLay’s office called the FAA and received information about the whereabouts of Laney’s plane. Not long after that, DeLay spoke to Craddick by phone and passed along that information. Then, a short time later, Lt. Will Crais, a Texas state trooper working out of the command center in the conference room adjoining Craddick’s office, called the DHS and tricked them into helping search for the missing aircraft. The information Crais used was the information DeLay had passed on to Craddick.
There’s plenty we still don’t know. But DeLay’s story keeps changing. And his proximity to three separate investigations — two of them potentially criminal — keeps getting closer and closer.
Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, but maybe Joe Biden would like to revise and extend his remarks as well.
Josh Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each Wednesday. Email: Joshua@j-marshall.com
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