Last week, Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS) released a statement purporting to prove that the townhouse he purchased from Ed Buckham's U.S. Family Network was sold at fair market price. But his statement (which we've posted here) and its accompanying documentation doesn't prove any such thing. In fact, it only confirms how odd the sale actually was.

Let's review.

As we reported for the first time last Monday, Ryun bought the Capitol Hill townhouse at far below market value in 2000 - as much as $100,000 below, according to experts we spoke to. The seller was the U.S. Family Network, a nonprofit controlled by Tom DeLay's former chief of staff Ed Buckham. The USFN was little more than a front for Buckham, a slush fund pumped full of money ($2.3 million over four years) by Jack Abramoff's clients. (Buckham was recently implicated in Tony Rudy's guilty plea for helping Abramoff bribe Rudy.)

So what's Ryun's defense?

Ryun claims that he found structural deficiencies that effected the price of the townshouse. According to his statement, Ryun consulted a housing inspector who found that "the upstairs master bathroom was in danger of falling through the living room ceiling because of the size of the bathtub put in by the previous owner." He then followed up by speaking with a contractor who estimated the repairs would cost "between $10,000 and $20,000."

But Ryun does not produce documentation for these estimates, nor does he suggest that such documentation ever existed or that he provided it to the U.S. Family Network as part of the negotiations. What he did do, according to his account, was "ask" the USFN to take the contractor's estimate "into consideration." The USFN then apparently voluntarily depressed the sale price based on Ryun's verbal assurances that repairs were needed. That's seems far from a normal process of negotiation. And how many building inspectors produce no written record of their work?

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On Friday, Paul noted how the guilty plea by ex-DeLay aide Tony Rudy is bad news for a man named Ed Buckham. Buckham's fall -- and what he could tell prosecutors -- would be even worse news for a lot of other people, including many elected officials, Paul pointed out.

Well, recent news reports tell us more about the man who's increasingly looking like the Grand Central Station of recent Congressional scandals, and what prosecutors might know.

Recall that shady house deal Paul reported on between Rep. Jim Ryun (R-KS) and Abramoff's multimillion-dollar sham charity, the U.S. Family Network? ABC News says Buckham facilitated it. And the Houston Chronicle this morning gives new details on how Buckham, who was both a private lobbyist and head of DeLay's ARMPAC, converted the majority leader's political donors into lobbying clients -- or was it the other way around?

I can never remember. Good thing prosecutors have a thousand emails from Rep. Tom DeLay's (R-TX) office to help them keep track, Newsweek tells us.

What other balls did Buckham have in the air? In addition to running the U.S. Family Network, DeLay's ARMPAC and Alexander Strategy Group, he lobbied for Brent Wilkes, a major figure in the Cunningham bribery scandal; he "employed" DeLay's wife Christine and Rep. John Doolittle's (R-CA) wife, Julie, in arrangements widely recognized to be channels to pump money to the husbands; and he had a funny habit of being around when DeLay was helping out Abramoff's Choctaw's clients, or DeLay met with Abramoff's shady Russian oil pals. Will he sing like a canary when the heat comes down?