An appeals court has not only overturned former House Majority leader Tom DeLay’s money-laundering conviction, it actually rendered judgments of acquittal.
This is not a surprising decision for anyone who watched the case, which was always based on unconstitutional ex post facto prosecution and former Travis County DA Ronnie Earle’s vindictiveness. Also remember that the DoJ spent six years investigating DeLay and found nothing.
Which is not to say that DeLay is free of sin. Indeed, DeLay’s leadership was one of the reasons the Republican House majority went from backing Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America to succumbing to Washington’s usual big-spending, horse-trading, “campaign dollars for access” in less than a decade. It’s just that none of those were crimes in the eyes of Democratic prosecutors. As far as they were concerned, DeLay’s real crime was helping unseat Democratic incumbents, and for that they had to find something, anything to nail him on.
I do wonder what happens to DeLay’s co-defendants who plead guilty to lesser charges to avoid prosecution (one of whom I used to know back in my college days)…
Tags: Republicans, Ronnie Earle, Texas, Tom DeLay, Travis County
[…] from Rep. Tom Delay (accused of violating a law that hadn’t been enacted at the time, and whose conviction was overturned and converted into an outright acquittal) to Kay Bailey […]