Delay and Company.......(CNN)

[RedEarth]

Delay and Company
By KAREN TUMULTY
Monday, March 14, 2005 Posted: 2:07 PM EST (1907 GMT
The G.O.P. leader's troubles mount, with new questions about his dealings with the former aide who helped build his political machine.

Ed Buckham's name was one you didn't hear much outside the secluded corridor where he worked on the first floor of the Capitol. But in that suite, which houses the majority whip's offices, Buckham was far more than an ordinary congressional aide in the three heady years following the Republican takeover of the House in 1994.

Thanks to an unusually close and trusting relationship with his boss, Tom DeLay's chief of staff quietly became one of the most powerful people in Washington.

"He was the guy DeLay turned to when he made a final decision," recalls a former aide to a member of the House Republican leadership, "and even after he made the final decision, the guy who could talk him out of it."

What even fewer people outside that office knew was that the two shared a bond that transcended power and politics: Buckham, a licensed nondenominational minister, was also DeLay's pastor.

For a while, in DeLay's early days as whip, they organized daily voluntary prayer sessions for the staff--until it began making some aides uncomfortable. After that, according to two sources who worked in the office at the time, the two of them frequently prayed together privately, joining hands in DeLay's office.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/ALLPOLITICS/03/14/delay.company.tm/