Ethics Committee? We have an Ethics Committee??
Well, spank me! And tie me up too, silly me, for wanting to discuss something other than the lurid, and for siding with Feingold, who makes the cogent point that while we focus on who did what to whom and who knew what when, Iraq has gone up in flames [... and, she said stubbornly, that will be the first article posted.]
On the other hand, it’s not the sex that’s the issue … it’s the ethics, it’s the hypocrisy, it’s the dark, rotten underbelly of the machine — and, Lord Love a [Lame] Duck, it’s the FALLOUT. The ripples on this story are drowning out the Righty harangue on security, including a shrill Dubby accusing the Left of wimpiness in no uncertain terms, thus:
“‘It sounds like they think the best way to protect the American people is to wait until we’re attacked again. That’s not the way it’s going to be under my administration.’”
But nobody is listening … they’re thumbing through their Inquirer searching for the salacious. So … embracing the underbelly, we go once more into the breach!
Today we hear that a bipartisan ethics committee will examine the Foley case … and you, as do I, might wonder where we’ll find congressional members both ethical enough, or bipartisan enough, to do the job — fox, hen house, pffft! Congress is a wash, boys and girls … nothing there is real; and nothing that comes of this can be other than surrealistic Kabuki Theatre.
Mr. Foley, meanwhile, is holed up in a Scientologist-run rehab [guess he doesn't trust the Catholics anymore] and any number of folk that know him are saying the whole issue is a handy ploy … comedian Wanda Sikes says that he’s giving alcohol a bad name.
What we’ve got here is a detail-by-detail [notice I didn't say blow-by-blow] look at sex/money/power … we’ve been here before — but this time it’s pointed at the holier-than-thou’s; let he who is without sin, yadda – they should read their own Book. There are a couple of articles on Gingrich, below, who should have kept his mouth shut. Well, they ALL should have kept their mouths shut. Too late now.
This has turned into a referendum on “gaydom” — as a blogger pointed out, we wouldn’t be hearing the word disgusting so often if it had a been the average old lecher lusting after young girls. David Corn blogged that he has “the list” of gays in power on the Hill, although he’s not sharing — but just knowing somebody mentioned it has closet’s springing open all over D.C. and lawyers being hired by the wary.
Dennis Hastart says he’s not going to step down — he’s the DeLay clone in charge … but even #3 clone, [my own states] Roy Blunt, is distancing from him while supporting. We’ll see how long Denny can hang on. The rotten innards of his party are oozing out for public scrutiny and the Pub’s know that if they break ranks, it’ll all come tumbling down — which is not to say the Dem’s are squeaky clean; they just have enough smarts not to call themselves Saints while playing a Sinners game.
I suppose this won’t be the last post on muck … but I’m softening the blow [pun/no pun ... can't help it] by giving you the Jon Stewart take, first [after Russ] — have a laugh at the absurdity of the moment. It may not be the national conversation we want … but it’s the one working in our favor.
Jude
The Most Outrageous Scandal? Bush’s Iraq Policy
Sen. Russ Feingold
10.05.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sen-russ-feingold/the-most-outrageous-scand_b_31020.html
With so much attention focused on the Foley scandal, there’s another story that hasn’t received enough notice: escalating violence in Iraq has resulted in the reported deaths of 24 U.S. soldiers since Saturday, and the Pentagon just reported that IED attacks in Iraq are at an all-time high.
Serious questions have been raised about Congressman Foley’s outrageous conduct, and the actions of senior congressional leaders.
Those questions need answers, but we also need to be focused on the tragic situation in Iraq, and what a mess this Administration has gotten us into. This rise in casualties is a tragedy for the families of these brave soldiers, and it’s a reminder of the terrible price this country is paying because of the Administration’s failed Iraq policy.
We all saw the recently declassified key findings of the National Intelligence Estimate. One thing those findings underscored is that our continued and indefinite presence in Iraq is benefiting global terrorist networks that threaten our country. The war has been a disaster, but the Administration refuses to admit its mistake. It refuses to do what’s right for our national security. By “staying the course,” this Administration is ignoring the conditions on the ground in Iraq and the growing threats we face around the world.
The American people aren’t going along with the Administration’s head-in-the-sand approach. In Wisconsin, and everywhere I go around the country, people want to get our troops out of Iraq. But, despite how much the American people want all this to end, we are still there and soldiers are still dying. Here’s today’s Washington Post report on the violence:
BAGHDAD, Oct. 4 — Thirteen U.S. soldiers have been killed in Baghdad since Monday, the American military reported, registering the highest three-day death toll for U.S. forces in the capital since the start of the war.
The latest losses — four soldiers who were killed at 9 a.m. Wednesday by small-arms fire — are part of a recent spike in violent attacks against U.S. forces that have claimed the lives of at least 24 soldiers and Marines in Iraq since Saturday, the military said.
The number of planted bombs is “at an all-time high,” said Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, a military spokesman, defying American efforts to stanch the vicious sectarian bloodshed in Baghdad that threatens to plunge the country into civil war.
These are the kind of stories we have seen too many times before, about increasing violence against U.S. forces and a spike in violence in Baghdad. And during a week when there are other big stories to cover, it’s easy for those stories to be overlooked. But we shouldn’t treat the bad news from Iraq as just more of the same. The decision to go to war in Iraq was one of the worst mistakes in the history of our country, and the bad news from Iraq won’t go away until we change course.
We have to redeploy our troops from Iraq, and we have to hold this administration accountable for the tragic mistakes it has made. This Administration’s misuse of pre-war intelligence and false rationale for invading Iraq are widely known. Now, the same Administration that sent our brave troops to Iraq under false pretenses is refusing to change the course. It’s time to stop paying such a terrible price for this Administration’s mistakes. As the Foley scandal continues, more brave U.S. soldiers will lose their lives. No matter how bad that scandal gets, or how much any other story gets covered, we can’t lose sight of the most outrageous scandal of all - the Bush Administration’s disastrous Iraq policy. ++
Jon Stewart on Mark Foley and the GOP sex predator scandal
From Newt Gingrich to Tony Snow, no Republican mouthpiece escapes un-slapped
WorkingForChange
http://tinyurl.com/nzkoa
Gingrich: Dems’ Sex Scandals Are Worse
Gingrich says Democratic sex scandals have been worse than conduct of former Rep. Mark Foley
CBS, AP
10/05/06
http://tinyurl.com/q3hxh
GREENVILLE, S.C., Oct. 5, 2006 - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Wednesday that Democratic sex scandals have been far worse than the suggestive Internet messages sent to teenage congressional pages by former Rep. Mark Foley.
Gingrich said Democrats have wanted to punish their offenders less than the GOP.
“What we don’t have to do is allow our friends on the left to lecture us on morality,” Gingrich said at a party fundraiser in Greenville. “There’s a certain stench of hypocrisy.”
Foley abruptly resigned Friday after being accused of sending salacious Internet messages to teenage boys who served as pages on Capitol Hill. The FBI and Florida law enforcement officials are investigating.
Gingrich would not say whether House Speaker Dennis Hastert should step down in the wake of the scandal. He also declined to discuss reports that Hastert may have known about Foley’s behavior for more than three years.
“I don’t know what he knew,” Gingrich said. ++
Sex scandals, blow jobs and the ’stench of hypocrisy’
DOUG THOMPSON
October 5, 2006
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/content/2006/10/sex_scandals_bl.html
Former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the shameless hypocrite who left Congress under a cloud of ethical questions and publicly chastised Bill Clinton while sneaking out on his wife and nailing a House Agriculture Committee staffer, is now claiming Democrats have bigger sex scandals than Republicans.
“What we don’t have to do is allow our friends on the left to lecture us on morality,” Gingrich said at a party fundraiser in Greenville, SC, Wednesday. “There’s a certain stench of hypocrisy.”
Gingrich should know something about the stench of hypocrisy. He stinks to high heaven from it.
This hypocrite is the man who served his first wife with divorce papers while she lay in a hospital bed. He divorced his second wife after his screwing of a House staffer became public while he was Speaker of the House and leading the GOP charge against Clinton.
This is the same Newt Gingrich who used to take campaign volunteers back to his car and so they could give him blow jobs.
Just ask Ann Manning, a married woman back home in Georgia who admits to an affair with Gingrich.
“We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, ‘I never slept with her,’” says Manning.
Dot Crews remembers Gingrich’s failed campaign for Congress in 1974.
“We would have won in 1974 if we could have kept him out of the office, screwing her (a young volunteer on Gingrich’s staff) on the desk,” Crews says.
Kip Carter, his former campaign treasurer, remembers a football game in Gingrich’s district. She was walking Gingrich’s two daughters back from the game and cut across the parking lot when she spied the Congressman’s car.
“As I got to the car, I saw Newt in the passenger seat and one of the guys’ wives with her head in his lap going up and down,” Carter says. “Newt kind of turned and gave me this little-boy smile. Fortunately, Jackie Sue and Kathy were a lot younger and shorter then.”
I worked for Gingrich in 1992, raising money for GOPAC, his political action committee. During fundraisers at homes in the Washington area, he would whisper something in the ear of a sweet young thing and they would disappear for 30-45 minutes.
“Newt’s getting a blow job,” a female GOPAC staffer told me. “He likes blow jobs.”
At the Republican National Convention in Houston in 1992, a GOPAC volunteer was assigned to escort young women to a hotel room for quickie oral sex and stand guard outside to make sure the Congressman was not disturbed. I found one of those women crying in the hotel bar afterwards.
“He’s a pig,” she said. “He made me get down on my knees and fellate him and then turned his back to me and told me to leave as soon as he came.”
So, I asked, “why did you do it?”
“I work for him,” she said. “I want to keep my job.”
When the Republicans were trying their best to impeach and convict Bill Clinton for lying about his oral dalliances with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, Gingrich was stepping out on his wife and sampling the sexual pleasures of Calista Bisek, a long and lean Capitol Hill Blonde more than 20 years his junior.
He told friends he would read the Bible while waiting for her to finish singing each week at The National Cathedral, which I guess gives a whole new meaning to the phrase: “Oh God, I’m coming!” Gingrich dumped his wife and married Bisek but GOP insiders tell me he is still up to his old tricks with any woman who is willing.
Gingrich is not the only tail chaser in the Republican Party. When he stepped down amid scandal, his first replacement, Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana, had to back out after admitting he cheated on his wife. Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana fathered a child out of wedlock and put his mistress on the House payroll. Even grandfatherly Henry J. Hyde, whom some suggest should replace current House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert if he is forced out because of the Mark Foley Congressional page scandal, admitted to a long affair in his younger days.
Democrats have their whore hounds as well and neither party can claim any moral high ground when it comes to sexual hijinks, but it is the Republican Party that claims to be holier-than-thou and preaches “family values.” For Gingrich to now claim Republicans are somehow better than others when it comes to sex scandals is a bald-faced lie and the height of hypocrisy, even for Washington.
And somebody in Greenville probably gave him a blow job before he left town. ++
“The List” (of Gay GOP Aides on the Hill); Hubris on Bloggingheads.tv
October 04, 2006
http://www.davidcorn.com/
There’s a list going around. Those disseminating it call it “The List.” It’s a roster of top-level Republican congressional aides who are gay.
On CBS News on Tuesday, correspondent Gloria Borger reported that there’s anger among House Republicans at what an unidentified House GOPer called a “network of gay staffers and gay members who protect each other and did the Speaker a disservice.” The implication is that these gay Republicans somehow helped page-pursuing Mark Foley before his ugly (and possibly illegal) conduct was exposed. The List–drawn up by gay politicos–is a partial accounting of who on Capitol Hill might be in that network.
I have a copy. I’m not going to publish it. For one, I don’t know for a fact that the men on the list are gay. And generally I don’t fancy outing people–though I have not objected when others have outed gay Republicans, who, after all, work for a party that tries to limit the rights of gays and lesbians and that welcomes the support of those who demonize same-sexers.
What’s interesting about The List–which includes nine chiefs of staffs, two press secretaries, and two directors of communications–is that (if it’s acucurate) it shows that some of the religious right’s favorite representatives and senators have gay staffers helping them advance their political careers and agendas. These include Representative Katherine Harris and Henry Hyde and Senators Bill Frist, George Allen, Mitch McConnell and Rick Santorum. Should we salute these legislators for being open-minded enough to have such tolerant hiring practices?
After all, Santorum in a 2003 AP interview compared homosexuality to bestiality, incest and polygamy. It would be rather big of Santorum to employ a fellow who engages in activity akin to such horrors. That is, if Santorum knows about his orientation.
Let’s be clear about one thing: the Mark Foley scandal is not about homosexuality. Some family value conservatives are suggesting it is. But anytime a gay Republican is outed by events, a dicey issue is raised: what about those GOPers who are gay and who serve a party that is anti-gay? Are they hypocrites, opportunists, or just confused individuals? Is it possible to support a party because you adhere to most of its tenets–even if that party refuses to recognize you as a full citizen? The men on The List might want to think hard about these questions–as they probably already have–for if I have a copy of The List, there’s a good chance it will be appearing soon on a website near everyone. ++
Closeted Gay Republicans and a Party in Political Free-Fall
Lawrence O’Donnell
10.05.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-odonnell/closeted-gay-republicans-_b_31040.html
The LA Times has outed Kirk Fordham today. He will not be the last closeted gay Republican outed by this scandal.
Today’s NY Times has a chart that outlines the “key communications” in the House of Representatives about Mark Foley’s inappropriate contact with pages. More than one of the names in the chart, which includes Kirk Fordham, are rumored to be closeted gay Republicans who have been working at the highest levels of the Republican leadership.
They have been looking at their names in print for the last couple of days and no doubt fearing for their futures in a Party that is in political free-fall.
Are ambitious closeted gay Republican officials, the most reliable people Speaker Hastert could have delegated the Foley problem to last year? Obviously not. Heat on a closeted gay Republican in the House is heat on all closeted gay Republicans in the House. The most innocent Foley emails were enough to worry the parents of the recipient. They were enough to worry the closeted gay Republicans too. But the closeted gay Republicans were perfectly positioned in the House to make the problem disappear.
Now two Republican staffers are locked in a credibility contest: it’s Kirk Fordham v. Scott Palmer, Hastert’s chief of staff. Palmer flatly denies that Fordham warned him about Foley. Hastert’s political life depends entirely on Scott Palmer’s credibility. I can’t find anyone in Washington who knows Palmer who thinks his credibility can survive this test.
It’s no accident that the first call for Hastert’s resignation came from Tony Blankley, Newt Gingrich’s former press secretary. Tony knows that the scandal cannot die as long as Hastert and his staff are still in the building.
The Republican base–the Evangelical get-out-the-vote troops–are going to be devastated when they discover how many closeted gay Republicans were involved in policing Mark Foley in the House of Representatives. Republican House members know this. That’s why momentum is building for a very quick House cleaning and a new Speaker by next week. ++
The Sexual Predator and the Sock Puppet: Why Hastert Did Nothing
Sidney Blumenthal
10/5/06
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sidney-blumenthal/the-sexual-predator-and-t_b_31011.html
Why shouldn’t the cover-up of a sexual predator roaming among the congressional pages have worked? For Dennis Hastert, Mark Foley’s cruising was a trivial, forgettable non-issue to be assigned to a non-member, the Clerk of the House, Jeff Trandahl, to insure that the Speaker would never hear of such a matter again.
Trandahl, since last September appointed executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, a sinecure at an organization established and controlled by the Congress, has himself virtually disappeared, refusing all comment.
As I explain in “How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime,” the political style of the House Republican leaders disdains accountability and ingrains impunity: “Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, [Majority Leader Tom] DeLay’s sock puppet, opened the 109th Congress by declaring that legislation had to meet the approval of ‘the majority of the majority’ — DeLay’s rule for right-wing control. On about 80 percent of the bills before the House, amendments are prohibited as a result of what are called ‘closed rules.’ By manipulation of so-called suspension bills — for example, those that name federal buildings and praise civic groups — the business of the House has become a playpen of trivialities. Instead of substantive debate, two-thirds of all the time on the House floor is devoted to these meaningless measures. By this means, the leadership concentrates power and frustrates the House from acting as deliberative body. The schedule of the House has been reduced to something like that of a small state legislature of the 19th century, with many of its lollygagging members turning up for work on Tuesday and leaving on Thursday.”
After the Foley scandal broke, Hastert said he hardly knew him, though he recalled he might have perhaps spoken with him once. Hastert’s lack of familiarity with Foley was reminiscent of his declaration that hardly anyone on Capitol had ever heard of Jack Abramoff. “Well, you know,” said Hastert, “a year ago most people around Congress couldn’t tell you who Jack Abramoff was and didn’t know who his associates were or what connections there are.”
In fact, Foley had been hand picked as one of DeLay’s deputy whips, just as Hastert was selected to be Speaker. Hastert’s “leadership” as DeLay’s front man was typified during the struggle over a Medicare bill that would prohibit the federal government from negotiating lower drug prices for seniors from the pharmaceutical companies. When it seemed that the bill would be narrowly defeated, DeLay ordered Hastert to keep debate open three hours past the limit while DeLay twisted arms and promised campaign contributions to pry the measure through.
Hastert also tried his best to suppress any oversight of corruption in the House. When DeLay’s corrupt campaign practices were exposed, Hastert repeatedly attempted to frustrate referrals to the Ethics Committee, which eventually issued three rebukes to DeLay. In response, Hastert removed the committee chairman and replaced him with a rubberstamp. Hastert’s defense of DeLay, however, did not prevent his indictment in Texas.
DeLay departed around the time that Foley’s emails to a page were drawn to Hastert’s attention. The Speaker was more upset by DeLay’s leaving than Foley’s lurking.
Hastert had assimilated a smug arrogance that he displayed when asked about rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. As I report in “How Bush Rules,” Hastert remarked: ‘It doesn’t make sense to me.’ He elaborated: ‘I think federal insurance and everything that goes along with it … we ought to take a second look at that.’ Thus Hastert upheld rugged individualism over a modern federal union. Just a month earlier, as it happened, Hastert had put out a press release crowing about his ability to win federal disaster relief for drought-stricken farmers in his Illinois district. While he was too preoccupied attending a campaign fundraiser for a Republican colleague to travel to Washington to vote for the $10.5 billion emergency appropriation to deal with Katrina’s aftereffects, he did finally return to the capital to push for even more drought aid from the Department of Agriculture. Hastert’s philosophy is not undermined by his stupendous hypocrisy, for hypocrisy is at the center of the Republican idea. Hastert simply has the shamelessness of his convictions.”
When news of Foley’s predatory behavior became public at last, Hastert at first said he learned about it only a week earlier, but then confessed that he had known for a year. He acted as though it didn’t really matter what he said. Nothing would damage him or his party; life would go on; Republicans would rule. But soon he was caught up in a frenzy of finger pointing. As I write in my column for The Guardian and Salon: “Now, the Republican leaders’ blame casting resembles the last scene of ‘The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,’ in which the varmints battle each other as their gold dust blows away.” ++
House to Investigate Page Scandal
JEFF ZELENY and CARL HULSE
October 5, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/washington/05cnd-hastert.html
WASHINGTON, Oct. 4 — The House Ethics Committee, after meeting behind closed doors on Mark Foley and the sexually explicit messages he sent to teenage pages, voted today to set up a subcommittee to investigate improper conduct between lawmakers and pages. Leaders said the inquiry would take “weeks, not months.”
The chairman of the bipartisan committee, Representative Doc Hastings, a Washington State Republican, said the committee has already granted authority to issue more than four dozen subpoenas for documents and testimony from House members and the staff.
He would not say if one of those who would receive a subpoena was Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, who has been under pressure to disclose more about why he did not act more assertively when he learned months ago that Mr. Foley was sending e-mails to an teenage page that disturbed the youth and his parents.
“The investigation will go wherever the evidence leads us,” Mr. Hastings said.
The committee’s decision to open a formal investigation comes as the matter of the Foley resignation last Friday continues to dominate Washington less than five weeks before critical midterm elections. Every day, new development thwart Republican efforts to change the subject.
On Wednesday, a former Congressional aide said Mr. Hastert’s office knew about reports of “inappropriate behavior” by Mr. Foley far earlier than Mr. Hastert’s office has acknowledged.
Mr. Hastert’s chief of staff, Scott Palmer, denied the account of the former aide, Kirk Fordham, who said in an interview that he had informed Mr. Palmer of the concerns about Mr. Foley before 2004. Mr. Hastert’s office had previously said it first learned of concerns about Mr. Foley in the fall of 2005.
Mr. Fordham worked in Mr. Foley’s office until January 2004, and on Wednesday, he resigned as chief of staff to Representative Thomas M. Reynolds of New York, chairman of the House Republican campaign committee. Mr. Fordham said he had become a political liability in Mr. Reynolds’s re-election campaign.
Mr. Fordham’s assertion about early reports raised more questions about whether Mr. Hastert and his staff had failed to respond quickly and forcefully enough to multiple warnings about the conduct of Mr. Foley, the Florida Republican who resigned from the House on Friday after being confronted with sexually explicit messages he had sent to teenage pages.
The statement further clouded Mr. Hastert’s prospects of retaining his position as speaker as his party reached for a strategy to deal with a controversy that seems to have undermined its chances of keeping control of Congress on Election Day.
Mr. Hastert was expected to have a news conference this afternoon.
“I had more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest levels of the House of Representatives, asking them to intervene when I was informed of Mr. Foley’s inappropriate behavior,” Mr. Fordham said Wednesday after resigning from Mr. Reynolds’s staff. “I have no congressman and no office to protect.”
Mr. Fordham said he had informed Mr. Palmer of the concerns while working for Mr. Foley, after the House clerk, Jeff Trandahl, approached him. Mr. Trandahl told him, Mr. Fordham said, that pages had come forward with accounts about Mr. Foley’s behavior. Mr. Trandahl, who resigned his position last year, did not return calls on Wednesday.
The accounts did not include accusations of overtly sexual advances and did not involve e-mail or instant messages of the sort that surfaced last week, Mr. Fordham said. Instead, they encompassed reports that Mr. Foley had been “way too friendly” toward the pages, he said.
Mr. Fordham said that he could not recall the specific date of his meeting with Mr. Palmer, but that it was between 2001 and the end of 2003.
A spokesman for Mr. Hastert, Ron Bonjean, issued a statement in Mr. Palmer’s name saying, “What Kirk Fordham said did not happen.”
Earlier Wednesday, Mr. Hastert’s allies thought they were making progress in solidifying the rank and file behind the speaker as lawmakers issued generally supportive remarks.
Republicans here and across the country not only expressed anger, but also feared that the latest disclosures would drag the controversy over Mr. Foley into a second week and eclipse a critical campaign period in their effort to retain their House majority.
At the same time, Republicans said in interviews that the disclosures solidified worries in the party that Mr. Foley’s conduct — hardly a secret — might have been kept quiet because Republicans were facing a tight election year.
Other suggestions surfaced on Wednesday that Mr. Foley’s undue interest in pages had previously been known. Representative Deborah Pryce of Ohio, a member of the leadership, asked the current clerk of the House, Karen L. Hass, to investigate reports raised this week in a party conference call that Mr. Foley was once turned away from the pages’ living quarters and that the staff in the page program had raised concerns about him with the former clerk.
In a sign of the strains in the House leadership, Representative Roy Blunt, Republican of Missouri, the majority whip, said Wednesday that he had not been told about Mr. Foley’s case until last week. Mr. Blunt criticized the handling of the inquiry into the initial e-mail messages.
He added that the matter should have been more vigorously pursued when an e-mail message from Mr. Foley to a former page was first brought to the attention of Mr. Hastert’s office 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,” Mr. Blunt told reporters in Missouri, The Associated Press reported. “You absolutely can’t decide not to look into activities because one individual’s parents don’t want you to.”
Other Republicans also said the initial inquiry fell short.
“As the father of a 2-year-old boy and a 4-year-old girl, I believe that we must always err on the side of caution when it comes to protecting our children,” Representative Jeb Hensarling, Republican of Texas, said. “And it is clear that what appeared to some to be innocuous e-mails at the time should have been investigated further.”
Word of the new disclosures rattled lawmakers, many of whom remained quiet late Wednesday as they sought to digest the developments and learn more before deciding whether to continue supporting Mr. Hastert.
Federal prosecutors sent a letter on Wednesday to the general counsel of the House, directing Congressional authorities to safeguard all relevant records in Mr. Foley’s former office.
In the letter, obtained by The New York Times, the acting United States attorney in Washington, Jeffrey A. Taylor, asked for the safekeeping of “documents and items” in Mr. Foley’s former offices “including his computer, electronic storage materials, hard copy documents and other items.”
The F.B.I. is conducting a preliminary investigation, officials said, and the request was intended to preserve records pending a decision by prosecutors on opening a full criminal inquiry into whether Mr. Foley violated federal sex crime laws.
The letter said House officials had already agreed to several actions, including changing the locks on Mr. Foley’s former office, stopping his remote access to computers and warning staff members not to delete or shred any documents.
The furor seeped even deeper into political races. In debates and on the campaign trails, Democrats asked their Republican opponents whether they supported the Republican leadership in Congress.
Mr. Fordham, 39, who had risen through the ranks of Republican politics and gained a reputation as a strategist, said he felt maligned by suggestions that he tried to participate in a cover-up for Mr. Foley. He decided, he said, to confront Mr. Hastert about his assertion that he was not aware of Mr. Foley’s circling too closely to young people.
In an interview, Mr. Fordham said he had hired a lawyer and intended to give his account to the F.B.I. on Thursday.
Mr. Bonjean, Mr. Hastert’s spokesman, denied that the speaker’s office had been aware of Mr. Foley’s conduct for at least three years.
“This matter has been referred to the Standards Committee, and we fully expect that the bipartisan panel will do what it needs to do to investigate this matter and protect the integrity of the House,” Mr. Bonjean said in a statement. ++
Maria Newman contributed reporting from New York and David Johnston from Washington.
Bush’s Megaphone Unable to Reach Above the Din
JIM RUTENBERG
October 5, 2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/05/us/politics/05bush.html
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., Oct. 4 — Through disappointing polls and bad news in Iraq, intraparty squabbling over immigration and bipartisan broadsides on port security, President Bush has been able to use the megaphone of his office to shout above the din and shape the national debate.
But the Mark Foley scandal is rendering that megaphone practically useless, just as the president is trying to turn up the volume to help his party beat back Democratic efforts to take control of Congress this November.
During his three-day campaign swing out West this week, Mr. Bush’s carefully honed attacks on Democrats as soft on terrorism have been drowned out by the Foley case and its political repercussions.
In interviews this week, White House officials expressed a sense of resignation, saying they were left with few options to help their party emerge intact from a scandal that appears to further threaten the Republicans’ hold on Congress.
For now, they said, they have little choice but to sit on the sidelines, watch it play out and hope that the House Republican leadership, starting with Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, finds an adroit way to extricate itself from the matter.
More than anything else, officials said, they are hemmed in by the unknown, girding for still more unwelcome developments in the Foley saga that could make any sort of full-throated defense or criticism of the House leadership now seem ill considered later. Mr. Foley, a Florida Republican, resigned his House seat on Friday after being confronted by ABC News with sexually explicit text messages he had sent to teenage Congressional pages.
“We’re not the keepers of the facts,” said a senior official, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal deliberations on the Foley scandal.
Referring to the president’s decision to express dismay at the reports about Mr. Foley, and calibrated support for Mr. Hastert as a father, teacher and coach, this official said, “We felt that it was important that the president speak out on this issue — it’s a shocking revelation and warrants his comments.”
But, the official added, “That can help mitigate an aspect of the story, but the story itself still has legs, because the story itself hasn’t been fully reported yet.” And, he indicated the president would not have much more to say on the matter any time soon.
White House strategists said they were hoping that the president’s statement of dismay on Tuesday had at least sent a signal to voters that the titular head of the party was just as concerned about the reports as they were.
But allies said that what the president said or did would have little effect as new details trickled out. All he can really do, they said, is try to keep hammering home his case against the Democrats, calling on the Republican faithful to vote against what he termed “the party of cut and run.”
Charles Black, a longtime Republican strategist with close ties to the White House who has been in contact with the president’s top political strategist, Karl Rove, said that at this point he did not think the White House would intervene by getting involved in the debate over Mr. Hastert’s future.
“Every time the White House gets involved in internal party stuff on the Hill it has a bad result,” Mr. Black said, referring to the White House’s involvement in the ouster of Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi from the majority leader’s post in 2002, which bred resentment within the party.
Mr. Bush pressed ahead this week on a fund-raising and campaign trip through the West. He joined on Wednesday with Senator Jon Kyl, Representatives J. D. Hayworth and Rick Renzi, and Gov. Janet Napolitano, all of Arizona, to sign a homeland security appropriations bill that will help pay for new border security initiatives. Still, the prickliness of the immigration issue within the party was on display: Mr. Bush renewed his calls for a guest worker program; Mr. Hayworth told reporters afterward that instituting such a program before the border was secured would be putting “the cart before the horse.”
Mr. Bush’s remarks in the afternoon at a reception for Representative Bob Beauprez, who is running for governor of Colorado, were not carried for very long on Fox News Channel. Fox switched away from them before the president got into his attacks against Democrats as good people who “just happen to be wrong people” when it comes to terrorism.
Soon after Mr. Bush’s remarks concluded, Fox News Channel was back to the Foley scandal, featuring a discussion about how much it was hurting the party’s prospects this fall. ++
Adam Nagourney contributed reporting from Washington.
What’s right and good doesn’t come naturally. You have to stand up and fight for it - as if the cause depends on you, because it does. Allow yourself that conceit - to believe that the flame of Democracy will never go out as long as there’s one candle in your hand.
~ Bill Moyers
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