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 DeLay Defends Trip and Vote, Attacks Critics
 
 By Mike Allen  and James V. Grimaldi
 
  House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) yesterday launched a defense of his travel arrangements and relationships with lobbyists, offering to appear before the ethics committee to answer questions and charging that his critics were relying on "fiction and innuendo."
 
 DeLay's efforts at political damage control followed a recent spate of news reports raising ethical questions about his fundraising and overseas travel paid for by special interests. 
 
 DeLay also moved to shore up his support with conservatives, one of his most important constituencies, with an afternoon speech to a tax summit of the National Republican Congressional Committee and an evening appearance at an $8 million fundraiser featuring President Bush. DeLay also told leaders that he wants Congress to find a way to help Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Floridian whose feeding tube is scheduled to be removed Friday.
 
 Speaking at a weekly session with reporters, DeLay alternated between attacks on the news media and attacks on Democrats. "With all the partisan politics of personal destruction that the Democrats have announced and have carried through on, I have yet to be found breaking any House rules," he said. "It is very unfortunate that the Democrats have no agenda. All they can do is try to tear down the House and burn it down in order to gain power."
 
  The Washington Post reported last weekend that an Indian tribe and a gambling services company made donations to a policy group that covered most of the cost of a $70,000 trip to Britain by DeLay, his wife, two aides and two lobbyists in mid-2000, two months before DeLay voted against legislation opposed by the tribe and the company. The group said it paid for the trip, and the group and DeLay said he did not know about the gambling money. 
 
 The Post also recently reported that an organization that had registered as a foreign agent picked up the cost of DeLay's trip to South Korea. DeLay and the policy group have said that he did not know of the registration. House ethics rules bar the acceptance of travel funds from registered lobbyists. They also require lawmakers to report the original source of funds and prohibit them from taking gifts of any kind from foreign agents.
 
 Last year, the House ethics committee admonished DeLay three times for official conduct, including asking federal aviation officials to track an airplane involved in a Texas political spat and for conduct that suggested political donations might influence legislative action. The committee found that DeLay had not violated a specific House rule. Nonetheless, the committee told him in one of the rebukes that it was "clearly necessary for you to temper your future action."
 







 DeLay's offer to appear before the committee comes after House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) in February replaced three of the Republican members who had voted with the Democrats to admonish DeLay.
 
 Since then, the committee has been stalemated by a partisan feud over a series of rules changes that the Republican leadership forced through earlier this year.
 
 DeLay, 57, an 11-term veteran, helped orchestrate the 1994 GOP takeover of the House and became renowned for his tough tactics as majority whip and later majority leader and an unrivaled fundraiser.
 
 With more than 60 reporters crowded around a huge table in his conference room at the Capitol, DeLay defended his 2000 vote that took the side of some gambling interests, an apparent break from his usual opposition to gambling.
 
 "As Paul Harvey likes to say, here's the rest of the story," DeLay said.
 
 The vote came two months after the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians that runs casinos and the gambling services company eLottery Inc. had written checks to a nonprofit group  --  the National Center for Public Policy Research  --  that covered the same amount as the cost of DeLay's London trip.
 
 The dates on the $25,000 checks to the public policy group coincided with the day DeLay left on the trip, May 25, 2000, according to grants documents reviewed by The Washington Post.
 
 DeLay said the financing of the trip and his vote had nothing to do with each other. He said he had voted against the anti-gambling bill only because it was too weak  --  adding that he later supported a measure that remedied its flaws.
 
 DeLay said the bill "fell short of its intended purpose," was unenforceable and "would not have reduced illegal gambling over the Internet." He said it would have "opened the doors to the expansion of gambling like horse racing, dog racing and jai alai over the Internet."
 
 DeLay mentioned a different version of the bill passed in 2003. "I voted for it," he said, "because those specific exemptions that would have given explicit federal permission for the expansion of gambling on the Internet were no longer in the bill." Both votes, DeLay said, were based on the bills' merits.
 
  But lawmakers and lobbyists who worked on the 2003 bill that DeLay supported said it was in many respects weaker than the bill he opposed in 2000. Its constraints on Internet gambling left more room for individual states to decide what to permit.
 
 The 2003 bill did not prohibit Internet wagering on jai alai, horse racing and dog racing. The 2003 bill exempts "any lawful transaction with a business license or authorized by a state."
 
  The Justice Department said the legislation was too ambiguous to be effectively enforced. Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella said in a letter to Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) that the 2003 bill could allow "the expansion of gambling opportunities" by letting states legalize Internet gambling currently considered illegal under federal law.
 
  Before DeLay voted for the 2003 bill, the political landscape on the legislation had changed and the tribe and eLottery were no longer active on the legislation, according to their lobbying disclosure forms.
 
 The majority leader  castigated what he called "a growing frenzy surrounding the ethics committee, with Democrats and their allies attempting to use it as a partisan tool for partisan ends."
 
 "When some stories recently emerged about me and the inevitable politically motivated allegations along with them, I instructed my staff to consult the ethics committee to get to the bottom of them," he told reporters. "We want to work with the ethics committee to prove how baseless these and other allegations are." He said he welcomes "the opportunity to respond with facts and information  --  not the fiction and innuendo that have been thrown around by some."
 
 DeLay said that the House "needs an ethics committee" and that he will work to resolve the current impasse. House Republicans turned back an effort yesterday by Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to create an ethics task force.
 
 DeLay and two Florida Republicans  --  Reps. Ander Crenshaw and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen  --  wrote to the ethics committee March 11 explaining their decision to accept a trip in 2001 from the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council, which registered as a foreign agent right before the trip began. They said they did not know the group had registered and were "as surprised as everyone when this new information was brought to us this week." Several Democrats made similar trips.
 
 DeLay saved his most caustic comments for The Post's coverage of the funding of his trip to Britain.
 
 "Through implication and innuendo, not facts, The Post attempted to lead readers to the conclusion that, one, I was somehow aware of how the National Center for Public Policy Research funded a trip they invited me on, organized and paid for," he said, reading from a statement. He said that the article "implied that because of that trip, I cast a vote against a particular bill" and added that the accusation "is why I'm just a little less than my normal chipper self."
 
 White House press secretary Scott McClellan, for the second day in a row, offered a careful endorsement of DeLay yesterday. "The majority leader is someone that we support," McClellan said. "He is someone we'll work very closely with in Washington to get things done on behalf of the American people."
 
 DeLay chuckled but did not directly answer a question about whether he would step down for the good of his party if issues about his conduct became too big a distraction. A few hours later, DeLay received a standing ovation when he addressed about 1,000 party donors at a National Republican Congressional Committee luncheon at a hotel here.
 
 He began with a dig at Howard Dean, the presidential candidate who is now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, and joked that "Republicans from Texas aren't known for our eloquocity." DeLay strode in to the strains of "Still the One."
 
 Staff writers Shailagh Murray and R. Jeffrey Smith and researcher Alice Crites contributed to this report.
 
   

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