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Originally Posted by Seaver
Upon reading this, what is the charge of conspiracy for?
Either it's not listed or I'm simply missing it, but I honestly dont know what the charge of conspiracy is based off of. If it gets brought to trial, yes he should step down from the Republican leadership while he fights the charges. That promise is vital to their cause.
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Seaver, this is probably the most comprehensive report about what led up to the indictment of Tom Delay.
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http://www.texasobserver.org/showArt...ArticleID=2017
Roadmap to a Scandal
The first TRMPAC-related trial set the stage for the criminal process to come
............... Most of the legwork on the TAB case was performed by an intense and driven young lawyer at the firm named Cris Feldman. A good-government absolutist, Feldman traces his political awakening in part to his junior year of high school in Clear Lake outside of Houston, when he read an expose of the Sharpstown political scandal called “Texas Under a Cloud” by Sam Kinch. At the University of Texas Law School, he took an active role in organizing around diversity issues. Feldman was eager to delve deeper into the 2002 campaign. Long before others recognized it, Feldman saw that the newly elected majority was bought and paid for by special interests. “Secret corporate cash warps the electoral system,” he explains. “It’s out-of-state board rooms tampering with policy that’s supposed to benefit Texas living rooms.”...................
.......“The ultimate point of this case was to enforce the election code and uphold the century-old principle that secret corporate cash should not influence elections and the Texas Legislature,” says Feldman.
It was precisely the nature of how the Republicans seized power and what they did with it that produced willing plaintiffs and a consensus among the politically active trial lawyers at Ivy, Crews & Elliott. “I told them, ‘let this be our contribution on the political end,’ and that’s how we got the firm to accept it,” recalls Crews............
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No matter where your political sympathies lie, I recommend reading it.....the whole thing. If you find things in this report that you want to challenge, post your argument.
The article says that prosecutor Ronnie Earle's office sent observers to the first trial. The major point that I was unaware of is that this all started because of a discrepancy in what the PAC reported raising in corporate contributions, to the Texas Ethics Commisssion, vs. what it reported raising, to the IRS, and, it started with losing democratic legislative candidates filing a civil suit:
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....... On November 22, 2002, the firm had filed a lawsuit against the <b>Texas Association of Business</b> after its president, Bill Hammond, boasted that the <b>TAB’s</b> use of corporate cash “blew the doors off the November 5 general election using an unprecedented show of muscle that featured political contributions and a massive voter education drive.” As the TAB case languished on appeal, new facts emerged about the involvement of Texans for a Republican Majority (TRMPAC) in the 2002 campaign. The PAC, founded by U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Sugar Land), had filed documents with the IRS that revealed more than $700,000 in corporate contributions that had not been disclosed to the Texas Ethics Commission.....
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