DeLay's Corporate Defenders

by Andrew Wheat

The legal defense fund of Congressman Tom DeLay—who is facing criminal indictment as a result of an addiction to corporate political contributions—is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional corporate funds to help DeLay beat his criminal rap. Not surprisingly, many of the contributors to DeLay’s defense fund have business before Congress, where this congressman is still an invaluable ally.

Since 2000, when DeLay began fighting what became a slew of House ethics complaints, his legal defense fund has raised more than $1.4 million. This fund has bagged more than $900,000 since 2002, when DeLay’s Texans for a Republican Majority PAC (TRMPAC) spent $600,000 in corporate funds to help establish a GOP majority in the Texas House—despite Texas’ prohibition on corporate electioneering. A little-noticed irony of DeLay’s legal defense fund is that it is raising much of its money from the very type of political donors that precipitated DeLay’s indictment. More than 100 corporations have contributed in excess of $400,000 to DeLay’s defense fund, or 28 percent of all the money raised, according to data compiled by Public Citizen’s Congress Watch. The defense fund’s top four corporate donors—Contran, Reliant, RJ Reynolds, and Panda Energy—spent $3.5 million lobbying DeLay and other federal officials over the past five years.