Tom Delay convicted of money laundering

Stalin

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Apr 4, 2008
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I wish I could say that I was surprised, but I am not.

Compare this to the 10 year witchhuunt by assorted right-wing tools to try and
get rid of Bill Clinton

"..Culminating a five-year legal battle, a jury in Austin, Texas, found former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay guilty on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Sentencing is set for December 20, with penalties ranging from 5 to 99 years in prison.

After a three-week trial, the jury deliberated for only 19 hours before convicting the former congressman. DeLay denounced the prosecution and verdict as politically motivated retaliation by Texas Democrats. His lawyers are expected to file an appeal.

DeLay was compelled to step down in 2005 as Majority Leader and de facto top Republican in the House of Representatives, after the corruption charges were filed against him in Texas. He eventually resigned his seat in Congress as well.

The case arose from DeLay’s efforts to pack the Texas congressional delegation in favor of the Republican Party. In 2002, a political action committee set up by DeLay sent $190,000 to the Republican National State Elections Committee, which then sent an identical sum back to Texas, divided up among seven Republican state legislative candidates.

The money contributed by business interests to DeLay’s PAC, Texans for a Republican Majority, was funneled through the committee in Washington in order to evade a state ban on corporate campaign contributions to state candidates. DeLay’s aides supplied the names of the seven state legislative candidates who received the donations a month later.

DeLay’s purpose was to support candidates who would give the Republican Party control of the state legislature, which sets the boundaries of federal congressional districts in the state. The political maneuver was successful; most of DeLay’s favored candidates won, giving the Republican Party control of both houses of the state legislature for the first time since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War.

Soon after the state legislature convened under Republican control—and with a Republican governor to sign the law—it took up an unprecedented mid-decade redistricting effort. US congressional districts boundaries are traditionally reviewed the year after each census, and the 2001 redistricting in Texas, worked out by a legislature split between the two parties, left Democrats with a 17-15 majority in the state’s congressional delegation.

No state had ever before revisited its redistricting after a change in party control in the state legislature, but DeLay’s office drafted a plan that packed black and Hispanic voters into a handful of majority-minority districts and left numerous Democratic incumbents in districts with a presumptive Republican majority.

more at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2010/nov2010/dlay-n27.shtml

Comrade Stalin
 
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