Earle Cleared DeLay Two Weeks Ago

That's the little detail that has emerged since yesterday's announcement by Dem hatchetman Ronnie Earle of the House Majority Leader's indictment on a nebulous "conspiracy" charge. And it may be that Earle was not acting on his own, but under orders from higher up the political food chain:

Travis County prosecutor Ronnie Earle's announcement yesterday that he was indicting House Majority Leader Tom DeLay came a little more than two weeks after Earle gave clear indications that the top Republican was off the hook.

"I have never said that DeLay is a target of the investigation," Earle told the Dallas Morning News on September 10.

Sources familiar with Earle's investigation had agreed that, before yesterday, it didn't look like the top Republican would be indicted.

On September 19, for instance, "ace" Newsweek sleuth Michael Isikoff reported that it looked like DeLay was in the clear:

"Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle's two-year campaign fund-raising probe is expected to wind down soon without bringing charges against the House majority leader, according to lawyers close to the case who declined to be identified because of legal sensitivities," Isikoff reported.

"Earle doesn't plan to refer evidence to the prosecutor in DeLay's home district either," an Earle spokesman told Newsweek.

So what changed? The Hammer has a pretty good idea:

DeLay says reports that he was off the hook prompted a firestorm of outrage from national Democrats, who pressured Earle to reverse course.

And when this gaseous "conspiracy" charge goes nowhere, guess who will take the heat for it? Ronnie Earle.

And every expert who knows anything about this so-called investigation or Texas election law says it's going nowhere:

Most legal experts looking at the conspiracy indictment of U.S. Representative Tom DeLay said Wednesday that either an insider has turned against DeLay or the prosecutor may have gone too far.

"I can't imagine indicting a majority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives without having a smoking gun, and that means someone who flipped on DeLay," said Buck Wood, an Austin lawyer who filed a related civil lawsuit on behalf of Democratic congressional candidates. "He's got to have corroborating evidence, too, bills and things proving where DeLay was at key times."

Several lawyers and law professors said Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle could have talked the grand jury into a questionable indictment if he hasn't secured key witnesses who were "in the room" with DeLay. Otherwise, this conspiracy case could be too hard to prove with just circumstantial evidence, they said....

Houston lawyer David Berg said the case against DeLay could possibly be proved with a lot of circumstantial evidence such as cryptic e-mail, hotel and travel bills placing him at meetings, and his "fingerprints" somehow on the transactions.

"But what a prosecutor wants is someone in the meetings. I think someone has to have rolled over on DeLay," Berg said.

He said prosecutor Earle has too much at stake to move forward without strong evidence. Earle has to be careful because he has taken heat over his public anti-DeLay comments and is marked by his failure to convict U.S. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-TX, some years ago, Berg said.

Attorneys familiar with the case said that key anti-DeLay cooperators, if they exist, could be co-defendants, insider Republicans or even witnesses from the contributing corporations....

The Texas law invoked against DeLay is loosely worded and casts a wide net. It merely requires that a conspirator must intentionally agree with at least one person that they or someone else in the conspiracy will commit an act to further a felony.

University of Houston professor David Crump said the government is nevertheless going to have to show the jury, no matter how many Travis County Democrats are sitting on it, that DeLay did something to promote a campaign-fund transfer that was against the law.

"Yes, it's possible to have a conspiracy in which one conspirator didn't do anything but merely agreed. But I've never seen it happen in reality. The agreement can't be that passive or tacit," Crump said....

Dick DeGuerin, an attorney for DeLay who beat Earle in the Hutchison case, said Wednesday that the prosecutor doesn't have just one cooperating witness — he has many. "I think everybody has cooperated with the government, and the evidence showed Tom DeLay did nothing wrong," he said.

He said none of the three accused men committed a crime since the funds were never improperly used.

The indictment does not follow the corporate-sponsored $190,000 into any specific account from which it was then used to improperly pay candidates. DeGuerin says it wasn't alleged in the indictment because it didn't happen. Any money sent to the candidates came properly from a separate individual donor account.

What Earle has here is an unprovable "conspiracy" to commit a legal act. Not only is there no "smoking gun," there's no "gun" at all - but there is plenty of smoke, as in being blown up the public's collective ass.

This has all the earmarks of the usual desperate Democrat "gotcha" lunge that will lead to their falling right into the PR compost heap yet again. Or, as Tom Bevan put it:

Democrats have pounced on the news with characteristic vigor, but if the rap against DeLay turns out to be bogus they may find themselves in the all too familiar position of facing a backlash for having overplayed a partisan hand.

To significantly modify the old Dow Chemical slogan, "Without Democrats, the Repubican majority itself would be impossible."

Of course, by that same token majority Republicans wouldn't be morphing into Democrats on an ever-rising number of issues, which is why DeLay may find that when he emerges from this latest opposition foray, his leadership post won't be waiting for him. But I don't feel like flogging that equine carcass today.

UPDATE: Brother Hinderaker, at a loss to find any legitimate legal justification for the DeLay indictment, speculates that it's part of an overall Democrat effort to pave the way for their promised filibuster of the President's next SCOTUS nominee.

Eh. Maybe if Earle had indicted Jon Cornyn, I could see it. From Texas, on the Judiciary Committee, and so forth. Hard to see what the Hammer has to do with that, even tangentially. And the press has been in an "anti-Republican feeding frenzy" for, oh, my entire lifetime at least.

My feeling is that, like sharks swim, eat, and make little sharks, so Donk hacks like Ronnie Earle abuse their authority to persecute Republicans for maximum partisan advantage.

But it's not as though I have any more specific guesses.

UPDATE 9/30: Here's a right-wing media bastion that has the long knives out for the Hammer.