AUSTIN, Texas — Authorities are conducting a criminal investigation into whether corporate money, including hundreds of thousands of dollars linked to U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, improperly financed the Republican Party's takeover of the Texas Capitol.
The probe is focused on several political and fundraising organizations run by Republican activists, investigators said. One of the organizations, the political action committee Texans for a Republican Majority, has direct ties to DeLay, a Texas Republican and one of the most powerful politicians in Washington.
At issue is whether the organizations improperly used corporate contributions to help finance the campaigns of more than 20 Republican candidates for the Texas House of Representatives in 2002, according to documents and interviews with prosecutors and government investigators.
Many campaign finance watchdog organizations believe the investigation is a test of whether "soft money" -- unlimited contributions from corporations, unions and wealthy individuals -- will begin playing a more direct role in state and local elections.
Such donations were outlawed at the national level by a campaign finance reform law, recently upheld by the Supreme Court, but the measure does not ban the contributions at the state level. Reform advocates worry that soft-money donors will begin contributing at the state level to curry favor and advance their causes.
Texas law bans corporations from contributing money to candidates for office. Corporations are allowed to fund many ancillary costs of a political campaign, such as office rental or telephone lines, and in many cases are allowed to educate voters through advertisements and other programs, provided they do not specifically advocate a candidate's defeat.
Texans for a Republican Majority is an offshoot of DeLay's Americans for a Republican Majority, created in 1994 to elect conservatives to public office. The Texas group was created in 2001, with the 2002 elections in mind, using seed money from Americans for a Republican Majority.
Investigators said they suspected that the Texas group spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on telephone banks and other initiatives during the election -- projects, they said, that went beyond the administrative costs corporations are allowed to fund in Texas elections. The money, in effect, represented a direct contribution to Republican candidates, they argue.
