I’m as happy as anyone to see Tom DeLay get subpoenaed, but let’s keep a few things in perspective. First, this is a civil lawsuit, not a part of the grand jury investigations, though it is connected to his recent admonishments.
The subpoena was delivered Wednesday to the Texas Republican’s attorneys in Houston after a failed attempt to serve him personally, said Lon Burnam, the Democratic state lawmaker from Fort Worth who filed the lawsuit.
The subpoena calls for DeLay to give a deposition Monday.
[…]
Burnam said there is a “litany of questions with regard to misuse of public funds” to pursue Democratic members of the Texas House who fled to Ardmore, Okla., and DeLay’s role in searching for them.
[…]
Texas state troopers were dispatched to find the Democrats and return them to Austin. The House ethics committee on Oct. 6 admonished DeLay for asking the Federal Aviation Administration to locate a plane owned by one of the fleeing lawmakers.
Burnam’s suit alleges that the Texas Department of Public Safety destroyed documents detailing their efforts to apprehend legislators and that its troopers had no lawful authority to arrest the Democrats.
Second, as noted, the suit has to do with records that were apparently destroyed by the Texas Department of Public Safety. What’s DeLay gonna say? “Yeah, I told those DPS boys to fire up the shredder so I wouldn’t leave any tracks. Guess you got me there, Hoss.” Even one of the Killer Ds concluded after a committee investigation that there was no malicious intent by DPS in the document shredding (his committee did not deal with the question of federal involvement, which is what DeLay got swatted on the nose for).
Finally, State Rep. Lon Burnam, whose lawsuit originally was to stop DPS from destroying anything else, has some credibility issues of his own. If it were someone else, I’d have more faith. Burnam has some penance to do before I’ll get worked up over this.
Sorry. Wish I could join the excitement, but not based on what I’ve read so far.
I can report one bit of good news, though. Jerome has another poll from CD22 which shows DeLay leading Richard Morrison by a skinny 42-35 margin; the same poll shows George Bush pulling 61% of the vote. This isn’t that far off from the 47-33 lead DeLay had in another poll, and given the likely sample sizes it could just be noise. Still, every poll we’ve had shows DeLay under 50%. It’s no wonder the Club for Growth is propping him up. And with comments like these (thanks, Chris!) he needs all the help he can get.
Bad Timing for DeLay
Charles Kuffner is skeptical that DeLay’s day in court on Monday will amount to much. But via Josh Marshall, we get this from the Electronic Privacy Information Center: In response to its FOIA request, EPIC has received from the Federal…