DeLay indicted in finance case

A Texas grand jury yesterday indicted House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and two political associates in a suspected campaign-finance scheme, forcing the House’s second-ranking Republican and its most assertive member to step down from his leadership post.

The four-page criminal conspiracy indictment, handed up on the final day of the grand jury’s term, also targets John Colyandro, former executive director of a Texas political action committee formed by Mr. DeLay, and Jim Ellis, who heads the majority leader’s national political committee.

Mr. DeLay, the first House leader to be indicted while in office in at least a century, categorically denied any wrongdoing yesterday and bluntly accused the Democratic district attorney of Travis County, Texas, Ronnie Earle, of pursuing the case for political motives.

“This morning in an act of blatant political partisanship, a rogue district attorney in Travis County, Texas, named Ronnie Earle, charged me with one count of criminal conspiracy, a reckless charge wholly unsupported by the facts,” Mr. DeLay said at a Capitol Hill press conference. “This is one of the weakest, most baseless indictments in American history.

“It’s a sham, and Mr. Earle knows it,” he said. “It’s a charge that cannot hold up even under the most glancing scrutiny. This act is the product of a coordinated, premeditated campaign of political retribution, the all too predictable result of a vengeful investigation led by a partisan fanatic.”

Mr. DeLay accused the district attorney of abusing the power of the district attorney’s office to exact personal revenge for the role the majority leader played in the Texas Republican legislative campaign in 2002 and for his advocacy for a new congressional map for Texas in 2003.

“As it turned out, those efforts were successful,” he said. “Over the course of this long and bitter political battle, it became clear that the retribution for our success would be ferocious. Today, that retribution is being exacted.”

Mr. DeLay said he had “notified the speaker that I will temporarily step aside from my position as majority leader pursuant to rules of the House Republican Conference.”

House Republicans quickly named Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri as majority leader, a move Mr. Blunt called temporary.

Mr. Earle was not available for comment, but told reporters in Austin, Texas, that his office prosecutes “abuses of power” and seeks to “bring those abuses to the public.” In defending the indictment, he said he has prosecuted many Democrats in the past.

“That kind of attack is what they believe of themselves,” Mr. Earle said. “I don’t know what else they would say.”

Mr. DeLay’s attorney, Dick DeGuerin, said he would seek a trial in the case before the end of the year.

He also said he would try to prevent his client from being “taken down in handcuffs, photographed and fingerprinted. That’s uncalled for.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, called the indictment the “latest example that Republicans in Congress are plagued by a culture of corruption at the expense of the American people.”

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said the Republican leadership in Washington “is now spending more time answering questions about ethical misconduct than doing the people’s business.”

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