Tom DeLay's attorney Dick DeGuerin Wednesday accused DA Ronnie Earle of jury shopping. After the first grand jury returned its conspiracy indictment, DeGuerin filed a motion to dismiss alleging the statute he was indicted under wasn't in effect at the time of the offense. Ergo, no crime. So Earle conceived of the money laundering charge and took it to a new grand jury on Friday. The grand jury refused to indict. On Monday, Earle took the case to a third grand jury, which returned the Indictment after four hours.

Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle had gotten one grand jury to indict DeLay on Sept. 28 on a charge of conspiring to violate state election laws. Two days later, a second grand jury rejected Earle's attempt to indict DeLay on money laundering charges. But a third grand jury on Monday gave Earle the money laundering indictment he sought.

Earle tried to justify the move by saying DeLay was trying to back out of his statute of limitations waiver in the first case. DeGuerin cries foul:

How's this for an attention deflector?

Both the FBI and CIA are calling it the first case of espionage in the White House in modern history. Officials tell ABC News the alleged spy worked undetected at the White House for almost three years. Leandro Aragoncillo, 46, was a U.S. Marine most recently assigned to the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney.

Aragoncillo was caught last year, arrested a month ago and began cooperating. Why break the story today? Did he steal secrets and give them to the Russians? Not quite.

Officials say the classified material, which Aragoncillo stole from the vice president's office, included damaging dossiers on the president of the Philippines. He then passed those on to opposition politicians planning a coup in the Pacific nation.

by TChris

Roy Blunt, who took over as House majority leader for the twice-indicted Tom DeLay, turns out to be DeLay's mini-me.

Tom DeLay deliberately raised more money than he needed to throw parties at the 2000 presidential convention, then diverted some of the excess to longtime ally Roy Blunt through a series of donations that benefited both men's causes.

When the financial carousel stopped, DeLay's private charity, the consulting firm that employed DeLay's wife and the Missouri campaign of Blunt's son all ended up with money, according to campaign documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Why is this significant?

Raw Story reports that the mainstream press has yet to pick up on the fact that Senators Brownback, Lott and Warner are all suddenly challenging Frist's control of the Senate -- which may spell trouble down the road.

What was once a hairline fracture in party cohesion is now a broken bone. Whether Republicans in Congress can reform a disciplined cavalcade behind the party’s agenda and its leadership – as the Democrats did on Social Security – may be the difference between holding onto the presidency and Congress and losing control in the years to come.

Also, the Gang of 14 is meeting at 4:30 today.

Tom DeLay may have the best lawyer around, but he's shooting himself in the foot. He needs to stay off the airwaves. The latest:

In his radio comments on Tuesday, Mr. DeLay offered a new insight on the case, saying he made a mistake in a voluntary interview with the prosecutor's office a few weeks ago that helped prompt the indictments.

He would not discuss his mistake in detail, but it apparently concerned the $190,000 check that is central to the case. Mr. Earle charges that the money, which included money from corporate interests in Texas, was turned over to the Republican National Committee with instructions to return $190,000 to designated candidates for the Texas Legislature. The accusation is that the transaction was intended to circumvent a prohibition on the use of corporate money in state races.

With the focus last week on Tom Delay, Bill Frist and Judith Miller, there has been very little attention devoted to Timothy Flanigan, President Bush’s controversial Deputy Attorney General nominee, who is tied to indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and the torture scandal.

In 2002, Flanigan was the top deputy to then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales -- during the period when the infamous Justice Department memo was written opining that if pain caused by physical coercion during interrogation did not result in major organ failure or death, it wasn't really torture.

As Senator Dick Durbin said in a Judiciary Committee meeting last week (received by e-mail):

by Last Night in Little Rock

I want to know why lying about sex warrants impeachment but lying about a justification for war that has killed 1935 and wounded 7700 Americans does not?

I want to know why the Republican members of Congress are openly two-faced and get away with it? They are so rankly political that party loyalty comes before loyalty to their country. Isn’t that a form of treason, or at least a violation of their oaths of office?

This is music to our ears. Dan Balz of The Washington Post writes that the indictment of Tom DeLay, coupled with Bill Frist's problems, RoveGate and Bush's declining ratings due to Katrina, Iraq, gas prices may signal serious setbacks to the Republican Party in the next election cycle, and that Republican leaders in Congress recognize it.

Republican strategists were nearly unanimous in their private assessments yesterday that the party must brace for setbacks next year. On almost every front, Republicans see trouble. Bush is at the low point of his presidency, with Iraq, hurricane relief, rising gasoline prices and another Supreme Court vacancy all problems to be solved. Congressional Republicans have seen their approval ratings slide throughout the spring and summer; a Washington Post-ABC News poll in August found that just 37 percent of Americans approve of the way Congress is doing its job, the lowest rating in eight years.

The timing is somewhat suspect, but hey, it's the thought that counts. President Bush issued 14 pardons today, including four to drug offenders:

• Adam Wade Graham, Salt Lake City, Utah
  Offense: Conspiracy to deliver 10 or more grams of LSD; 21 U.S.C. 841(a)(1), 841(b)(1)(A)(v), and 846.
  Sentence: Nov. 23, 1992; District of Wyoming; 30 months imprisonment, later reduced to 11 months and 21 days of imprisonment, and five years supervised release conditioned upon performance of 250 hours community service.

• Larry Paul Lenius, Moorhead, Minn.
  Offense: Conspiracy to distribute cocaine; 21 U.S.C. 846.
  Sentence: Sept. 29, 1989, District of North Dakota; 36 months probation conditioned upon three months service in community confinement and payment of $2,500 in restitution.

by TChris

The president doesn’t think much of the prevailing science that warns of the threat of global warming, choosing to dismiss evidence that his own EPA found persuasive. But he may find it difficult to continue his recent studied silence on the issue in light of increasing hurricane activity and this ominous development:

The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in a century, continuing a trend toward less summer ice that is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, various experts on the region said today.

The findings are consistent with recent computer simulations showing that a buildup of smokestack and tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases could lead to a profoundly transformed Arctic later this century in which much of the once ice-locked ocean is routinely open water in summers.

Even more disturbing:

by TChris

Sources report that the SEC yesterday "authorized a formal order of investigation of [Sen. Bill] Frist's sale in June of HCA Inc. shares."

The order allows the agency's enforcement unit to subpoena documents and compel witnesses to testify, said the [sources], who asked not to be identified because the order hasn't been made public.

Whether or not Frist's suspiciously timed stock sale was based on an insider's knowledge (background here and here), this isn't a good development for a politician who plans to run for president.

According to the AP, Tom DeLay's lawyers fear an Indictment charging him with conspiracy could be imminent.

By expanding the charges to include conspiracy, prosecutors made it possible for the Travis County grand jury to bring charges against DeLay. Otherwise, the grand jury would have lacked jurisdiction under state laws.

In my experience, grand juries indict on what the prosecutors ask them to indict on. The prosecutor prepares the charges and presents them to the grand jury. There have been renegade grand juries--the Rocky Flats case comes to mind--but even in that case, there were no Indictments issued. More about that here.

My take: Don't get your hopes up. But, this is one instance where I'd love to be proved wrong. AmericaBlog says it just might happen.