Guest blogged by David Edwards
In a recent interview on MSNBC’s Hardball, Tom DeLay explained how District Attorney Ronnie Earle had duped the grand jury into returning an indictment by saying “Oh sure. You can indict a ham sandwich. This is a ham sandwich without the ham.”
DeLay has spun this indictment as a partisan attack by Ronnie Earle. At the same time, he downplays the role of the grand jurors as mere puppets of the prosecutor.
Now, in an interview with News 8 of Austin,the foreman of the grand jury, William Gibson, has stepped forward to defend the indictment:
…
Gibson thinks there is enough evidence to convict Delay.
“We would not have handed down an indictment. We would have no-billed the man, if we didn’t feel there was sufficient evidence,” said Gibson.
…
The evidence is there to prove Delay was involved in wrongdoing and also prove that he and his fellow grand jurors acted independent of political influence, Gibson said.
“It wasn’t Mr. Earle that indicted the man. It was the 12 members of the grand jury,” Gibson said.
Guilty as charged!
Jack Abramoff: "I did not have private trips and vacations with that man, you see, that was my friend Mr. Ed."
Doug E.
Heard Randi Rhodes yesterday scoffing at delay’s claim that Ronnie Earle is a "partisan hack". Turns out that in his career he has prosecuted 15 politicians, 12 of them democrats.
Maybe it’s just me, but if i were indicted, the last thing i would do is downplay, bad mouth or sneer at the grand jury in any way, through attacks on Mr. Earle. I would tread softly, concentrate on proving my innocence.
hmmmm……my comment didn’t post……..sabotage!!
Ah, there it is. Ok, I will work on my patience. 🙂
Wow you guys ain’t seen nothing yet!!!
Hoo boy……Talk about Culture of "Corruption"!!!!
"Family connections have also helped Rep. Blunt’s son, Missouri Governor Matt Blunt, who received campaign contributions from nearly three dozen influential Missouri lobbyists and lawyers when he ran for governor of Missouri in 2004, half of whom had provided financial support to his father.
In 2000, when Matt Blunt was running for Secretary of State, Rep. Blunt was involved in an apparent scheme to funnel money through a local party committee into Matt Blunt’s campaign committee. Committees tied to Rep. Blunt contributed $90,000 to the 7th District Congressional Republican Committee which, in turn, contributed $76,000 to Matt Blunt’s campaign committee. In addition, Altria – the company for which Blunt’s wife is the top lobbyist – made a $24,000 contribution to Matt Blunt’s campaign, and a $100,000 contribution to the 7th District Congressional Republican Committee.
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Legislative Assistance for Jack Abramoff’s Client
Rep. Blunt and his staff have close connections to uber-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who is the subject of criminal and congressional probes. In June 2003, Mr. Abramoff persuaded Majority Leader Tom DeLay to organize a letter, co-signed by Speaker Hastert, Whip Roy Blunt, and Deputy Whip Eric Cantor, that endorsed a view of gambling law benefitting Mr. Abramoff’s client, the Louisiana Coushatta, by blocking gambling competition by another tribe. Mr. Abramoff has donated $8,500 to Rep. Blunt’s leadership PAC, Rely on Your Beliefs."
http://www.beyonddelay.org/beyo...roy_blunt_r_mo
"This second case suggests that the funneling of large amounts of money through national committees to bypass state campaign-finance laws may be more widespread, raising questions about whether federal officials have monitored such transfers as closely as is now being done by a Texas prosecutor in the DeLay case, according to watchdog groups.
Indeed, the groups maintain that officials, especially those at the Federal Election Commission, routinely fail to investigate questionable transactions. ”The limits are constantly being tested because people operate on the assumption that the enforcement agency isn’t going to do anything about it," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, which wants stricter campaign finance laws.
One of Abramoff’s top clients was a Mississippi Indian tribe, the Choctaws, which hoped to stop or slow the expansion of legalized gambling in neighboring Alabama. Shortly after Scanlon delivered the $500,000 from his company, Capitol Campaign Strategies, the Republican Party sent $600,000 to Bob Riley, the Republican candidate for governor of Alabama. Riley opposed the expansion of gambling and thus was favored in the election by the Choctaws. Scanlon, in addition to having once worked for DeLay, also had once worked as a staff member for Riley.
Riley won the election, defeating Governor Don Siegelman, who favored an expansion of legalized gambling. ”It looks to me that somebody wanted to hide where this money was coming from," Siegelman said of the $500,000 that went to his rival.
”It is similar" to the DeLay case, said Melanie Sloan, director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, arguing that that donation’s purpose, as in the DeLay case, was to bypass state laws."
LINK
Mother of pearl these guys are so corrupt its RAINING from the sky!!!!! Matt Blunt is Tom Delay, is Jack Abramoff is Roy Blunt, Bob Ney, Michael Chertoff, and the ENTIRE THING equals the biggest culture of corruption you’ve ever seen!!!!!!!
HOW BIG OF A PRISON DO WE NEED!?!?!!!
Doug
You can find all of the Delay indictment court docs and info on TRMPAC here:
http://www.trmpac.org
The american MSM is covering up what the british press isn’t (link here).
Please read the article to see how much damage Delay and the other neoCons have done.
Doug E.:
Have you seen this recent post on the Wayne Madsen Report about your "friend" Michael Chertoff? I think it supports your highly critical take on Cherrtoff.
O’Neill’s FBI colleague, Mike Dick, aggressively investigated this Israeli ring before and after 911. But like O’Neill, he soon found himself removed from his duties on the orders of the then-head of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division Michael Chertoff. Dick was very suspicious when Israeli movers quickly moved Zim American Israeli Shipping Company out of its 10,000 square feet of office space on the 17th Floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center. The partially Israeli state-owned firm forfeited a $50,000 security deposit when it terminated its lease and vacated the building one week prior to 911. According to a non official cover (NOC) CIA source who worked with Dick, Israeli movers moved explosives into the 17th Floor office space after Zim moved out.
After 911, Dick as well as the CIA NOC were harassed by their superiors on orders “from above.” Those orders came from Chertoff. Dick was first relieved of his primary counter-espionage duties, eventually sent to Pakistan to investigate the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, and eventually buried in a desk job at FBI headquarters in Washington, DC. According to the CIA source, Pearl was murdered because he was getting too close to the money trail that financed 911. The CIA source said, “the same group that beheaded Pearl in Pakistan did the beheadings in Iraq.” The source added that the beheadings were “not Al Qaeda.”
The above is an excerpt from the "Clearing the Baffles for 911" web page on http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/. It is fairly lengthy, but well researched piece. I recommend it to everyone.
This post may seem off-topic, but there is an investigative journalist named Daniel Hopsicker, who previously worked in the MSM, who has reported that alleged 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta frequented the SunCruz gambling casino ships owned by Abramoff, et al. Atta is also alleged to have been a major and favored courier for drugs/arms smuggling and laundering of millions in illicit funds through the Middle East. It is quite possible that DeLay’s corruption is but a part of a much larger criminal network linking many individuals and responsible for much of the violence and carnage we have witnessed in the past half-dozen years or so. If the whole story comes out (including what Sibel Edmonds knows), I will think many people will be absolutely astounded at the size and the depth of intrigues that have been going on before our very eyes.
EWATSTUD,
Its sickening I agree. How the hell could this go on that long, and yes we damn well want Sibel Edmonds to appeal to the Supreme Court. Reveal the whole testimony. National state secrets, my god damn ass.
Doug
This is not necessarily suggested in the referenced article by Madsen, but by other researchers like Peter Dale Scott, whose work I have read recently:
I am gravitating to the view that Big Oil and the military-industrial complex is the prime mover behind this criminal network described by Madsen which is entrenched in our government, and has been, off and on, exerting eneomous influence over our country’s direction for at least the past four decades. I think it is oil-based money and power which is the prime motivation of all this deeply criminal and covert activity.
For instance, consider the JFK assassination. It has also credibly been linked to Big Oil and the military industrial complex by people like Col. L. Fletcher Prouty. (For instance, alleged assassination financier, ardent John Bircher, and oil magnate H. L. Hunt fled from his home in Texas just one hour after the JFK assassination to a hideaway across the border in Mexico to live until just before Christmas of 1963.)
George H. W. Bush, the 1980 VP candidate, was a central figure in the so-called "October Surprise" secret negotiations with Iranians to keep American hostages to stay put in Iran until after the 1980 Carter-Reagan election. (These facts are well documented in Robert Parry’s excellent book Secrecy and Privilege). Energy conservationist Carter was obviously not Big Oil’s favored choice for president.
The Bushes have also been very convincingly tied to American mafia and CIA covert black operatives in a book by Houston Post (newspaper now defunct – bought out by the Chronicle) reporter Pete Brewton provocatively titled The Mafia, CIA and George Bush. The S & L debacle was largely due to rampant fraud perpetrated by the mafia and CIA ops, and some of the illicit Savings and Loan activities were secretly funding the illegal Iran-Contra operations in Central America.
Yes it is, EWAT. But oil for who?
NOT just control of the oil for the USA……Control of the oil for ISRAEL itself, and for Pakistan and all their neighbors!
Damn them!!!! They deceive their own people and deceive us as well.
Doug E.
I thought that campaign finance reform was supposed to take care of this. Sure, I see how well it working. Here is my plan for Campaign Finance reform. Make it ILLEGAL for them to speak to these special interest groups that claim to be representing the people. BS, the Politicians are the ones representing the people, that is who put them there. Make the politicians do what they promised. Make campaign promises a contract to be fulfilled, with reelection as the payment for a contract satified. I am tired of all these politians taking their own interests and placing them before the will of the people that put them in office in the first place. I don’t care about what party they are affiliated with, it happens on both sides of the aisle, and this is just one example of the status quo in Washington.
If the founding fathers were alive today, and found out what has been done to the Constitution, there would be hell to pay. I am certain a Second US civil war would occur.
Special Interest my ass, what about my interests. :crazy: :crazy:
This video news story *does* do well to show that a Grand Jury, and not Earle, made the decision to return an indictment.
However, where was the journalist’s head? She KNOWS that the Grand Jury Foreman does not want his face shown because he fears repercussions by others.
THEN, in her story she goes on to…
– show the street he lives on
– focus in on the house he lives in
– make sure to repeat his full name several times
– pinpoint the exact part of town he lives in (in her sign-off).
– describe his past employment
Geez, it’s a good thing she respected his fears of being targeted and didn’t show his face, hm?
Given everything else she does in her piece, any moron who wanted to could now track the guy down.
Just heard the news – the Texas Grand Jury just handed Delay ANOTHER indictment for money laundering.
Yes, and apparently a different grand jury and a different prosecutor than the first which may be significant.
Please change the quotation from Dr. King–it’s "injustice ANYWHERE is a threat to justice everywhere" for heaven’s sake. Doesn’t that make more sense? It’s really hard to take anything else seriously if you can’t get that right–and I completely agree with you on anything I read up until I saw that misquote. Get it right. This stuff is more important than you think. Thank you. I’ll keep checking. When you change that, I’ll start reading.
Hi Sarah – Brad didn’t write that quote by Dr. King — it’s from one of the advertisers, "Sirius." Maybe you can follow the link and complain to them!
Thanks,
Kira
The 12-member grand jury that indicted U.S. Rep. Tom Delay, R-Sugar Land, faces scrutiny from critics who say they are lackeys for Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle.
Foreman William Gibson lives in a Northeast Austin neighborhood.
It’s been his philosophy not to have his picture taken because he doesn’t want to be harassed, Gibson said.
Gibson isn’t really afraid of that. He did his duty and that bound him to look at Tom Delay as just another Texan accused of criminal conspiracy, he said.
"I like his aggressiveness and everything, and I had nothing against the House majority man, but I felt that we had enough evidence, not only me, but the other grand jury members," Gibson said.
The grand jury foreman also takes great exception to accusations that he and 11 other grand jury members followed the lead of Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle instead of following the evidence.
"It was not a rubber stamp deal. It was not an overnight deal. If we needed extra information, it was provided to us," Gibson said.
On Wednesday, Earle would not go into details about any potential evidence against Delay. But he did describe the scheme he’s accusing Delay of coordinating.
"The indictment describes a scheme whereby corporate money, which cannot be given to candidates in Texas was sent to the Republican National Committee where it was exchanged for money raised from individuals and then sent to those Texas legislative candidates," Earle said.
Gibson thinks there is enough evidence to convict Delay.
"We would not have handed down an indictment. We would have no-billed the man, if we didn’t feel there was sufficient evidence," said Gibson.
The evidence is there to prove Delay was involved in wrongdoing and also prove that he and his fellow grand jurors acted independent of political influence, Gibson said.
"It wasn’t Mr. Earle that indicted the man. It was the 12 members of the grand jury," Gibson said.
Gibson is a former sheriff’s deputy and a former investigator for what is now the Texas Department of Insurance.
I like this phrase
"I like his aggressiveness and everything, and I had nothing against the House majority man, but I felt that we had enough evidence, not only me, but the other grand jury members,"