Killer D’s return to work in Texas, but the controversy lingers

Welcomed by throngs of well-organized supporters, 51 Democratic lawmakers returned to Austin, Texas, late yesterday, four days after fleeing to Ardmore, Okla., to prevent passage of Tom DeLay’s congressional redistricting plan.

But just when I thought the fun was over, new details are coming to light about potentially problematic use (or in this case, misuse) of federal Homeland Security resources.

When one of the missing Democratic lawmakers left Texas on his private plane, state troopers were anxious to determine where he was going in the hopes of bringing him (and any other lawmakers onboard) back to the statehouse. Desperate to track down where the plane went, a Texas law enforcement official contacted a federal Homeland Security agency to request assistance.

While that’s problematic in and of itself, it gets worse.

The Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency under the umbrella of the Dept. of Homeland Security, announced yesterday that agency officials had been led to believe that the plane was in trouble and may have crashed.

“From all indications, this request from the Texas DPS was an urgent plea for assistance from a law enforcement agency trying to locate a missing, lost, or possibly crashed aircraft,” the agency said in a statement released yesterday.

Not surprisingly, no one wants to take responsibility for having tricked federal Homeland Security officials. Texas House Speaker Tom Craddick said he never contacted federal officials and never directed anyone else to, either.

So who called the feds? The Dallas Morning News discovered it was Will Crais who works for the state’s Special Crimes Division. According to the Morning News report, Crais was “working on the hunt for the missing lawmakers, an effort that was run out of a conference room next to Mr. Craddick’s office.”

Isn’t that an interesting little detail? As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo noted today, “If this was all going in a conference room adjoining Speaker Craddick’s office, that makes it a bit less credible that he didn’t know anything about what they were doing.”

But that’s not all; there’s still the little matter of Tom DeLay back in Washington. DeLay, you might recall, voiced support early on for federal involvement in the search for the 51 Killer D’s, saying Monday that he thinks “it would be nice” for federal law enforcement officials to help Texas state troopers “if it is legal for them to do so.”

The Dallas Morning News reports that DeLay’s office insists there was “no contact between [DeLay] and the Homeland Security Department or the FBI.” But as Josh Marshall notes, Craddick sent DeLay an inquiry about federal help in the search and DeLay’s office has acknowledged that DeLay passed the request on to the Justice Department.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a fairly significant level of involvement to me. DeLay sent a request to the Justice Department about federal officials helping Texas state troopers track down and arrest the missing Dem lawmakers. Whether the original request came from Craddick is irrelevant. DeLay, who was personally desperate to get his redistricting plan through the legislature, got directly involved the moment his office forwarded the request to Justice.

Whether you agree with the Dem lawmakers’ decision to leave Texas or not, it’s impossible to justify use of federal officials in a Texas search to arrest state lawmakers.

The fiasco in Texas over the last several days may have been amusing for a while, but the misuse of federal domestic security forces is far from a trivial matter.

While a Texas officer was pleading with federal authorities to commit resources to helping track down a Democratic lawmaker’s plane, Al Queda launched a new and deadly strike in Saudi Arabia killing dozens of people and the Dept. of Homeland Security was launching a national bioterrorism drill in Seattle with the simulated detonation of a radioactive “dirty bomb.”

Someone, in other words, got federal authorities involved with the search for Killer D’s in Texas at a very inappropriate time.

The Texas Legislature may be back at work today, and most of Austin appears anxious to put this whole ordeal behind them. But some questions remain unanswered, and those questions won’t be going away anytime soon.