WASHINGTON – Among individual donors to the legal defense fund of an embattled former House majority leader, Tom DeLay, benefactors from New York and city suburbs in New Jersey outnumbered donors from Mr. DeLay’s native Texas during the last quarter, according to the defense fund’s latest filing with the House of Representatives.

The records, released yesterday, show that 33 donors from New York City and State and New Jersey suburbs – principally Englewood, Tenafly, and Teaneck – contributed a total of $39,770 to the Tom DeLay Legal Expense Trust. The most recent filing, which accounts for contributions and expenditures from July 1 to September 30, 2005, reports $177,020 in contributions from individuals, including 23 from Texas, and a total of $141,000 from corporate donors. The $318,020 in total contributions made this the fund’s most successful quarter to date.

Past quarterly reports from Mr. De Lay’s legal defense fund, which dates back to 2000, show only one individual donor from New York City and four contributors from New York State, who listed Chappaqua, Oyster Bay, Calverton, and Bedford Corner as their places of residence. Mr. DeLay received individual contributions from four donors living in Connecticut towns considered suburbs of New York City, and three from New Jersey. One prominent New York City conservative activist, Mallory Factor, made a $1,000 corporate contribution to Mr. DeLay’s legal defense fund via Mallory Factor, Incorporated.

The marked increase in New York-area donations was the result of an August “pro-Israel” fund-raising event “targeted to Jewish Republican donors,” the trustee for Mr. DeLay’s defense fund, Brent Perry, told The New York Sun.

Under the “expense details” category in the newest report, some of the legal defense fund’s resources went to the Texas-based Bracewell & Giuliani law firm, in which Mayor Giuliani is a partner. According to the report, the fund made two payments of $50,000 for “legal fees” to the firm, the first in late August and the second in mid-September.

New York’s connection to Mr. DeLay provoked the ire yesterday of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which marked the one-month anniversary of Mr. DeLay’s indictment on charges related to campaign-finance abuses by demanding that members of New York’s congressional delegation who received campaign contributions from Mr. DeLay return the money.

According to a DCCC press release, four Republican members of Congress have returned campaign contributions from Mr. DeLay, and the committee singled out Republican New York Reps.Vito Fossella, Sue Kelly, John Sweeney, Sherwood Boehlert, and Tom Reynolds for allegedly not refunding a total of $58,509 in DeLay campaign contributions.

Yesterday’s legal defense fund report was the first filed since Mr. Delay’s indictment on September 28, but reflects only two days’ worth of post-indictment fund raising. The next report, covering a period from October 1 to December 31, is due January 30, 2006.