DeLay'ed Investigation

Josh Marshall brings us up-to-date on developments regarding the potentially criminal activities of Representative Tom DeLay during the Texas Democratic plane scandal. Snippet:

"As everyone now knows, a couple weeks ago, most Democrats in the Texas state House ran off to neighboring Oklahoma to avoid a vote on a DeLay-designed redistricting bill. Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick ordered the Department of Public Safety (DPS) to arrest the runaway Democrats and bring them back to Austin.

State troopers from the DPS eventually roped the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into the manhunt. By tricking them into thinking they were searching for a missing or crashed plane, the DPS got Homeland Security to help track down the airplane of former Texas Speaker Peter Laney (D), whom they suspected of helping ferry Democratic legislators out of the state. That’s where things stood when I wrote about this last week.

Then last Thursday, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge declined to release the transcripts of conversations between the Texas DPS and his department because, he said, his department’s internal inquiry was “potentially a criminal investigation.” The scope of the potential wrong-doing further expanded when it was revealed that the DPS had ordered all its records of the manhunt destroyed on May 14. A grand jury in Austin is now investigating what laws the DPS might have violated by destroying those documents."