This one’s for all you hard-core scandal fans.
As a few of you have no doubt noted, the record disagrees on how many e-mails Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX) turned over to prosecutors.
In Newsweek‘s April 10 edition (available online now), DeLay’s lawyer Richard Cullen is quoted saying the majority leader has turned over 1,000 e-mails to Justice lawyers handling the Abramoff scandal.
But Roll Call this morning attributes to Cullen a comment that DeLay has “voluntarily turned over to federal investigators about 100 e-mails written by DeLay staffers over the years that had to do with Abramoff.”
Well, which is it — one hundred? One thousand? We emailed Cullen. “It was about a thousand,” the lawyer Blackberried back.
The number, of course, isn’t the point. If DeLay turned the e-mails over, it’s a fair bet they don’t implicate him. (Cullen told Newsweek the congressman doesn’t even use e-mail.) They may implicate the little fish, but Justice has most of them on ice already. We asked Cullen how his team decided which emails to provide and which to hold; we haven’t heard back.