Foley Quits Amid Allegations of Email Sex Scandal

Top GOP Staffer Forced Out for Role in Page Scandal

October 04, 2006 1:44 PM

Brian Ross and Rhonda Schwartz Report:

Jake Tapper contributed to this report.

The chief of staff for Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds, Kirk Fordham, resigned after questions were raised about his role in the handling of the congressional page scandal, according to Republican sources on Capitol Hill.

Those sources said Fordham, a former chief of staff for Congressman Mark Foley, had urged Republican leaders last spring not to raise questionable Foley e-mails with the full Congressional Page Board, made up of two Republicans and a Democrat.

"He begged them not to tell the page board," said one of the Republican sources.

People familiar with Fordham's side of the story, however, said Fordham was being used as a scapegoat by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.

They said Fordham had repeatedly warned Hastert's staff about Foley's "problem" with pages, but little was done.

The complaint about Foley was brought to the chairman of the page board, Congressman John Shimkus (R-IL), last spring, and he then consulted with the Clerk of the House of Representatives, Jeff Trandahl.

At Fordham's urging, according to the sources, the matter was not given to the full board, and instead Congressman Foley was privately approached and told to stop all contact with the page he had been e-mailing.

"This is something we should have been aware of, and we weren't, and I'm very unhappy about that," said Congresswoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), who also serves on the page board.

The Democrat on the page board, Congressman Dale Kildee (D-MI), said it was "unprecedented" to have handled the matter without informing the board members.

Fordham was also instrumental in orchestrating Foley's abrupt resignation last week hours after ABC News confronted the congressman with sexually explicit instant messages allegedly sent to pages.

Fordham offered ABC News a deal if it would not publish the content of the instant messages.

"He said we could have the exclusive on the resignation if we did not run direct quotes from the instant messages," said Maddy Sauer, the ABC News producer who dealt with Fordham.

ABC News refused to make any such deal.

Capitol Hill sources say Fordham's resignation was demanded by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, whose job is on the line because of his handling of the page scandal.

Repeated phone calls to Fordham for comment have not been returned.

They said Fordham had repeatedly warned Hastert's staff about Foley's "problem" with pages, but little was done

[...]In the United States and some other countries, the term is sometimes used to describe people attracted to adolescents, especially in regard to sexual activities. However, most medical definitions of pedophilia limit it to adults with a sexual attraction to prepubescent children.
... ... ...

F65.4 Paedophilia

Paedophilia - a sexual preference for children, boys or girls or both, usually of prepubertal or early pubertal age
An isolated incident, especially if the perpetrator is himself an adolescent, does not establish the presence of the persistent or predominant tendency required for the diagnosis.

Diagnostic criteria for 302.2 Pedophilia
(cautionary statement)
A. Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sexually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involving sexual activity with a prepubescent child or children (generally age 13 years or younger).

B. The person has acted on these urges, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.

C. The person is at least age 16 years and at least 5 years older than the child or children in Criterion A.

Report: Hastert's office warned about Foley two years ago

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A senior congressional aide said Wednesday that he alerted House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office two years ago about worrisome conduct by former Rep. Mark Foley with teenage pages.

Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley's inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene."

The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged.

Foley resigned last week after he was reported to have sent salacious electronic messages to teenage male pages. He has checked into an undisclosed facility for treatment of alcoholism, leaving behind a mushrooming political scandal and legal investigation.

Fordham submitted his own resignation Wednesday. "I never attempted to prevent any inquiries or investigation," Kirk Fordham said in a statement.

Fordham was once Foley's chief of staff. At the time of his resignation he had been serving in the same capacity for Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-New York, a member of the GOP leadership who has struggled to avoid political damage in the scandal's fallout.

Justice Department launches investigation

Fordham's resignation comes as the Justice Department ordered House officials to "preserve all records" related to disgraced Rep. Mark Foley's electronic correspondence with teenagers, intensifying an investigation into a scandal rocking Republicans five weeks before midterm elections.

Republicans have been struggling to put the scandal behind them, but another member of the leadership, Rep Roy Blunt of Missouri, said pointedly during the day he would have handled the entire matter differently than Speaker Dennis Hastert did, had he known about the complaints when they were first raised last year.

"I think I could have given some good advice here, which is you have to be curious. You have to ask all the questions you can think of," Blunt said. "You absolutely can't decide not to look into activities because one individual's parents don't want you to."

Acting U.S. Attorney Jeff Taylor for the District of Columbia sought protection of the records in a three-page letter to House counsel Geraldine Gennet, according to a Justice official speaking on condition of anonymity.

Such letters often are followed by search warrants and subpoenas, and signal that investigators are moving closer to a criminal investigation.

The request was aimed at averting a conflict with the House similar to a standoff in May when FBI agents raided Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson's office seeking information in a bribery investigation.

FBI interviews former pages

Meanwhile, FBI agents have begun interviewing participants in the House page program, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation. The official declined to say whether the interviews were limited to current pages or included former pages.

Justice Department spokeswoman Tasia Scolinos stressed that the investigation is still preliminary. Also, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirmed that it has begun its own preliminary inquiry. Spokesman Tom Berlinger said the case is in its initial stages and is not a full-blown criminal inquiry.

Fordham played a key role in fast-developing events late last week. Initially, Foley was reported to have written overly friendly -- not sexually explicit -- e-mails to a former Capitol page. A day later, ABC news followed up with a report that said the Florida lawmaker had also sent sexually explicit instant messages to at least one other male page.

He said earlier this week he asked Foley about the sexually explicit instant messages, and the congressman confirmed they were probably his.

"Like so many, I feel betrayed by Mark Foley's indefensible behavior," he said. He blamed Democrats for seeking to make a political issue of the matter in Reynolds' re-election campaign, "and I will not let them do so."
McCain calls for independent investigation

There were signs of concern among Republicans, as well.

Sen. John McCain of Arizona called for a group of former senators and others to investigate how the House handled the affair.

"We need to move forward quickly and we need to reach conclusions and recommendations about who is responsible," McCain said during a campaign speech for Sen. Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island. "I think it needs to be addressed by people who are credible."

Some other Republicans rallied to the speaker. The chairmen of two coalitions of social and fiscal conservatives in Congress said he should not step down. "Speaker Hastert is a man of integrity," Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana, and Rep. Joe Pitts, R-Pennsylvania, said in a joint statement. (GOP rallies around speaker)

Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-Louisiana, the congressman who sponsored the page at the heart of the furor, said Hastert "knew about the e-mails that we knew about," including one in which Foley asked the page to send his picture. But he quickly backed off that comment, saying he discussed the e-mails with Hastert's aides, not the speaker himself.

"I guess that's a poor choice of words that I made there," he told AP.

Hastert has insisted he not know about the e-mails that were discussed with his staff.

Representative says Hastert's staff knew about e-mail

Alexander said in an interview he first took up the matter after receiving press inquiries in November, when he told Hastert's staff and the parents of the 16-year-old boy who received the e-mails. The parents wanted the correspondence stopped but apparently did not want to take the matter further.

After a second round of press inquiries in the spring, Alexander said, he again notified the family and discussed the e-mails with the new majority leader, John Boehner of Ohio, on the House floor during a vote.

Alexander said Boehner turned first to Reynolds, the architect of the Republican midterm election strategy.

"I went to Boehner before Reynolds," Alexander told AP. "He sent Reynolds to me to talk about it. Within a minute Reynolds and I were talking."

Boehner and Reynolds have both said they had spoken with Hastert about a complaint concerning a former page from Louisiana last spring, after Alexander told them about it.

The uproar that followed Foley's resignation has enveloped Republicans who were already at risk at losing control of Congress in elections five weeks away.

Conservative activist Richard A. Viguerie was among those who called for Hastert to step down. "The fact that they just walked away from this, it sounds like they were trying to protect one of their own members rather than these young boys," Viguerie said on Fox News.

Hastert has he would not quit.

Alexander defended Hastert on Wednesday, as well as his own response.

"Hey, what else was I supposed to do?" Alexander asked. "I was very uncomfortable even talking to somebody in the speaker's office."

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Just a simple question, but since when is Hastert any more responsible for reporting crimes than anyone else? If someone knows of a crime, call the cops. And how about Jefferson, involved in obvious crime, has he resigned yet?

okie wrote:

Just a simple question, but since when is Hastert any more responsible for reporting crimes than anyone else? If someone knows of a crime, call the cops. And how about Jefferson, involved in obvious crime, has he resigned yet?

Who cares about the criminal angle; if you had someone who you were the manager of, and you found out about stuff like this, wouldn't you do the most basic investigation to see if the law was broken?

You're basically saying that because Hastert et al decided to look the other way, they don't have any responsiblity in this matter. But I doubt that will fly very far.

As for Jefferson, f*ck that guy. I hope he goes to jail for a long time with a bunch of Mark Foleys.

Cycloptichorn

Now Associated Press Labels Foley as a Democrat!
First on Fox, Then on AP! Though Atleast AP Had the Decency to Issue a Correction! http://www.bradblog.com/?p=3572

Cycloptichorn wrote:

okie wrote:

Just a simple question, but since when is Hastert any more responsible for reporting crimes than anyone else? If someone knows of a crime, call the cops. And how about Jefferson, involved in obvious crime, has he resigned yet?

Who cares about the criminal angle; if you had someone who you were the manager of, and you found out about stuff like this, wouldn't you do the most basic investigation to see if the law was broken?

You're basically saying that because Hastert et al decided to look the other way, they don't have any responsiblity in this matter. But I doubt that will fly very far.

As for Jefferson, f*ck that guy. I hope he goes to jail for a long time with a bunch of Mark Foleys.

Cycloptichorn

If he knew about criminal activity, then Hastert is accountable, as is every other person that knew about it. Fire them all, including all the Democrats that knew about it and did nothing. What is so difficult to understand here?

Another point, if Hastert knew of stuff bordering on weird but not a crime, and he tried to have Foley booted for it, no doubt the leftist politically correct crowd and gay rights groups, and probably the Democratic Party would have accused him of being the biggest bigot on earth and asked for him to resign. Can't win anymore.

White House officials also have been in contact with religious groups, urging them to demonstrate restraint in their statements about the Foley situation to avoid alienating some of the party's most dependable voters.