DeLay pledges to keep raising funds

WASHINGTON -- A defiant Tom DeLay said yesterday that he would continue to be active in shaping the GOP agenda on Capitol Hill and predicted he would be cleared of the ''frivolous" charge that he was part of a scheme to fund illegal corporate contributions to Republican candidates in his home state of Texas.

DeLay, who was forced to step down as House majority leader last week after he was indicted by a Texas grand jury, also hinted at his legal defense in the case. While DeLay did not deny that his political action committee raised corporate funds, he said the money was not illegally laundered by a national Republican group so it could be funneled to state legislative candidates.

''I will continue my partnership with the [House] speaker," and will ''absolutely" continue to raise campaign funds for Republican congressmen, DeLay said on ''Fox News Sunday."

''I wouldn't call it 'running the show'; I would call it working together," added DeLay, whose second-in-command title belied his enormous power and influence in the House.

The former majority leader -- who has stepped down temporarily as required under House rules -- said he expects to return to his post, the duties of which are now under a caretaker team of three senior House Republicans.

''This is politics at its sleaziest," DeLay said of the criminal indictment against him. ''My lawyers tell me that this is so frivolous, so over the top, so embarrassing to the judiciary that we ought to be able to get it out of here pretty quickly."

DeLay is accused of being part of a plan to help elect GOP candidates to the Texas Legislature by channeling corporate contributions to their races. Many Republicans won their state legislative races, giving the GOP a majority in the Legislature, which then drew congressional district lines to favor Republicans.

Republicans picked up five congressional seats in Texas in 2002, expanding a narrow majority and further entrenching DeLay's power as leader.

While it is not illegal -- and in fact commonplace -- for legislatures to protect incumbents and their own respective parties when drawing congressional district lines, the prosecutor in the case, Ronnie Earle, said DeLay and his associates went too far by soliciting corporate donations to aid the state legislative candidates.

While Earle has not spelled out specific evidence against DeLay, the indictment says conspirators collected $190,000 in corporate funds and sent it to the Republican National Committee, which then contributed a similar amount to key GOP state legislative candidates. Corporate funding of state legislative races is illegal in Texas.

''We drew the line years and years ago in terms of corporate money. Everybody knows that," said former representative Martin Frost, a senior Texas Democrat who lost his reelection campaign in 2002, largely as a result of the new district lines. DeLay ''has every right to push his beliefs as far as he can, but he doesn't have the right to break the law," Frost said in an interview.

DeLay didn't deny yesterday that the political action committee he founded has solicited corporate funds, but he suggested the money was not deliberately funneled to the state legislative candidates through a federal committee.

He said TRMPAC, the committee he founded, was allowed to raise corporate funds for ''administrative" purposes, and sent ''leftover" money to a national Republican committee, which he said was already funding state legislative races. Asked whether the $190,000 was laundered through the RNC's state legislative race fund, DeLay said, ''it hasn't been proved that there was a list provided along with the check. That's what the courts are for."

Democrats are pointing to DeLay's ethics woes -- he has been chastised on other matters already by the bipartisan House Committee on Standards and Official Conduct -- and are accusing Republicans of abusing their power. Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Republican of Tennessee, is also under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission on allegations of insider trading.

''There's a culture of corruption and cronyism" in the Republican-controlled Congress, Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said on NBC's ''Meet the Press" yesterday.

Republicans at first rallied around their leader, and Representative Tom Reynolds, a New York Republican who chairs his party's congressional campaign committee, yesterday accused Earle of launching a politically-motivated prosecution. But some Republicans are anxious to get in place a permanent leadership not tainted by ethics complaints.

''We got elected basically by saying we would live by a higher moral standard, and I don't think recently we have," Representative Christopher Shays, a moderate Connecticut Republican, said on CNN yesterday.

''Tom's problem isn't just this. It's continual acts that border and go sometimes beyond the ethical edge. They may not be illegal, but he's always pushing that ethical edge to the limit," Shays said.