Sure, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas) is out of the House leadership. And he’s still in the crosshairs of federal and state prosecutors. But if you’ve been following the recent revelations about the deposed majority leader, you have to wonder seriously how he’s even still serving in the House of Representatives, let alone running for reelection in a race he might even win.

Forget about funding irregularities in Texas. They pale in comparison to what we’re now learning about DeLay, his onetime chief of staff and pastor, Ed Buckham, and the now-radioactive lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

Back in 1997, while DeLay and his hard-charging Republican Caucus were pillorying Bill Clinton for allegedly taking campaign money from the People’s Republic of China, DeLay and his sidekick Buckham were in the midst of selling themselves to a couple shady Russian energy executives with “close ties” to the Russian security services.

Yep, you got that right. DeLay and his right-hand man Buckham were bagging hundreds of thousands of dollars from foreigners while DeLay was the third-ranking member of the House Republican Caucus.

You’d figure people would think that was a problem.

Let’s take a moment to review what we know.

The latest news comes out of the reporting into the U.S. Family Network. That’s the sham nonprofit that was supposedly engaged in grassroots activism on behalf of various social-conservative causes. In fact it was a front group aimed mainly at funneling money from Abramoff’s clients into the hands of Ed Buckham, Buckham’s wife, Wendy, and the lobbying firm Buckham was then trying to establish, the Alexander Strategy Group.

If you look closely at the flow of money, what becomes clear is that Abramoff, through his clients, funded Buckham’s move from DeLay’s leadership office into the lobbying sector by arranging for his clients to pay more than $3 million dollars into the sham U.S. Family Network.

As The Washington Post outlined Sunday, more than a million dollars went right into the Buckham’s own pockets. The other 2 million went to a variety of DeLay-related political operations — buying the “safe house” that served as DeLay fundraising headquarters on Capitol Hill, renting Abramoff’s skyboxes, cars for the Buckhams, vacations and much more.

Now where did the money come from? And what if any quid pro quos were involved?

Let’s talk about the Russian executives from NaftaSib and the $1.3 million dollars they pumped into the U.S. Family Network.

We’ve known for some time that the Russians funneled $1 million into the U.S. Family Network in 1998. But Peter Stone, writing in National Journal earlier this month, found an earlier 1997 payment of a quarter of a million dollars that seemed awfully closely timed to two favors DeLay did for his Russian funders.

Back in June 1997, Buckham went to Moscow to spend some quality time with the Russian funders he was courting. A month after that, the prime funder, NaftaSib General Manager Alexander Koulakovsky, came to Houston for a DeLay-organized meeting of local oil executives. DeLay couldn’t make it, but his wife and his deputy chief of staff, Susan Hirschmann, were on hand.

One week after the Houston meeting, Buckham’s U.S. Family Network got a $250,000 check from Koulakovsky, laundered through NaftaSib’s London front company NationsCorp. (It was the biggest chunk of money the “network” got that year.) Two weeks after the check cleared, DeLay, Buckham, Hirschmann and Abramoff were in Moscow to meet with Koulakovsky and his crew.

So let’s game this out.

Back in his heyday, Tom DeLay’s political operation was being bankrolled — to a significant degree — by Russian “energy executives” with some murky mix of ex-KGB and Russian mafia ties. The money didn’t come in formal political contributions — it couldn’t have, since it was being paid by foreign nationals. It came funneled through a sham nonprofit that DeLay’s chief political handler set up to take money from now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff.

Buckham’s use of the U.S. Family Network looks like a major violation of U.S. tax law at a minimum. DeLay’s political operation was getting a lot of its funding from foreign interests looking for favors on Capitol Hill. (Most of the rest of the money for the U.S. Family Network came from the Marianas sweatshop owners and one of Abramoff’s Indian tribes — money that manages to seem almost clean in comparison.)

Both facts show that Jack Abramoff — whom DeLay now pretends hardly to know — was a major funder of DeLay’s political activities.

If this isn’t enough to drive DeLay out of Congress, really, what is?

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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