WaPo:
Prosecutors have e-mails showing Rep. Tom DeLay‘s office knew lobbyist Jack Abramoff had arranged the financing for the GOP leader’s controversial European golfing trip in 2000 and was concerned “if someone starts asking questions.”
House ethics rules bar lawmakers from accepting free trips from lobbyists. DeLay, R-Texas, reported to Congress that a Republican advocacy group had paid for the spring 2000 trip that DeLay, his wife and top aides took to Scotland and England.
The e-mails obtained by The Associated Press show DeLay’s staff asked Abramoff – not the advocacy group – (for the cost figures) that had to be legally disclosed on congressional travel forms. DeLay’s office was worried the group being cited as paying the costs might not even know about them, the e-mails state.
[…]
DeLay has steadfastly maintained he believed that the center paid for the trip as he reported.
Yes, it sure looks like a gun, and there’s certainly smoke coming out of it, but if DeLay has taught us one thing about his legal problems, it’s this—the smoking gun only proves that he’s still being persecuted by his political enemies.
Who knew that DeLay’s political enemies had managed to plant people in deep cover within his own staff? These persecutors perniciously proliferate precisely where you wouldn’t expect them.
At one level, DeLay’s catch-all persecution-by-political-enemies argument may well be absolutely true. When all the dust has settled, and DeLay has moved beyond indictment to conviction (because justice cannot be denied, remember?), it will turn out that he himself was his own worst political enemy.
Taking it as a given that DeLay was absolutely corrupt to start with, even before he ascended to absolute power, what did absolute power do to him? Seems to have afflicted him with blinding hubris – that’s the kind that ultimately led Oedipus to gouge out his own eyes – to the point where he just knew he could never be brought to justice. He didn’t even bother to destroy the evidence. Now that’s just the sloppiest kind of hubris, in my book.