DeLay made a surprise appearance on Brit Hume's show last night, and provided some insight to the charges. He said that he had organized the PAC, as he had organized many others, but that he didn't manage or operate them, which makes sense. This guy's affiliated with a couple dozen PACs and there's no way anyone could be the majority leader, a congressman, and manage the day-to-day ops of all those organizations.
That being said, based on what DeLay said, no crime was committed anyway. The deal is that "soft" money from businesses cannot be used to directly fund campaigns for things like advertising and promotion. Those must be funded by "hard" money that's collected $200 at a time from individuals. However, political organizations can use soft money to pay bills, rent, salaries, etc. So what these guys in Texas, and apparently most of these groups do, is they collect soft money from companies, and whatever they don't use to pay their local bills gets sent to the RNC or DNC.
The RNC and DNC take the soft money that they get from the PACs and use that money to pay their bills, which frees up all of the hard money they collect for overt political expenses. If the RNC/DNC couldn't use the soft money that's coming in to pay bills they would need to use hard money for rent, bills, and salaries, which would cut into their ability to fund campaigns. So the Texas PAC would send soft money to the RNC, and the RNC sends hard money to the campaigns. This is a completely legal transaction.
What the Texas DA did was make the case to the grand jury that what was really going on was simple money laundering, which actually isn't the case. Laundering involves making money from illegal sources look like it came from a legal source, usually by exchanging money for something of value and then changing it back to cash. What the PACs and national committtees are doing is taking money from one source and using it to pay bills, which frees up money from another source to pay for other things. That's not money laundering.
Another twist was Hume had mentioned twice on his show that the Texas DA had prosecuted a lot of Democrats in addition to some Republicans. DeLay clarified that statement by adding that all of the prosecutions of Democrats by this DA occurred years ago when this DA was working his way up through the State's Attorney ranks, and a lot of them were his political opponents. He hasn't gone after any Democrats in a long time.
Lastly, following Limbaugh's "Place a Bag of Crap in Front of a Liberal And They'll Always Step In it" theory, Pilosi rushed to the cameras yesterday to denounce Delay and the Republicans by saying this was another example of political corruption on the part of Republicans. But from what DeLay was saying, the RNC AND the DNC do this all the time. So much like Pilosi denouncing the lobbist-payed travel folks only to find out she was knee-dip in that crap herself, she's once again gone out and villified herself and her party. She's such a capable woman.
Okay, that's twice today - cut it out or I'll start saying nice things about you.
