Legal
experts say Earle better have 'smoking gun'
By MARY FLOOD
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle
Most
legal experts looking at the conspiracy indictment of U.S. Rep.
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. [snip]
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. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas,
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. [snip]
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. [snip]
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.
