Icepicks and Nukes

This is my fourth attempt at writing this entry.

The subject was going to be the politician who most jeopardized or ended his or her political career during this election cycle through self-inflicted injuries, careless mistakes, or straight up incompetence.

My original post was going to be about Joe Lieberman.
Then it was Katherine Harris.
Then it was George Allen, and I had gotten pretty far along in writing it when recent events overtook it.
Today we have a winner: NRCC chairman Tom Reynolds.

He gets word of the original email, passes it on to Dennis Hastert, and does nothing.
Then his current chief of staff goes off the reservation to do freelance damage control for Foley and tries to get ABC to spike its report of the smoking gun IM chat transcripts.
Then, he holds a press conference about the Foley scandal at a day care center surrounded by children. A reporter even asks Reynolds if the children can leave the room so they can discuss the Foley scandal. See the video on You Tube:

He was already in a difficult re-election battle amid a hostile national mood towards Congress, but in the course of the week he just made his own re-election campaign much more difficult and the subsequent scandal will attract the scrutiny of the national political press. Regardless of what happens to him on Election Day, this man will not be running the NRCC in 2008.

FYI, the title was taken from a Nine Inch Nails song.

LA Times: Foley Saga No Shock to Some

WASHINGTON — Years before sexually explicit electronic messages sent by Rep. Mark Foley to teenage House pages became public last week, some on Capitol Hill say, the Florida Republican was known to have a special interest in younger men.

In interviews with the Los Angeles Times, several current and former congressional employees and others said they recalled Foley approaching young male pages, aides and interns at parties and other venues.

“Almost the first day I got there I was warned,” said Mark Beck-Heyman, a San Diego native who served as a page in the House of Representatives in the summer of 1995. “It was no secret that Foley had a special interest in male pages,” said Beck-Heyman, adding that Foley, who is now 52, on several occasions asked him out for ice cream.

Another former congressional staff member said he too had been the object of Foley’s advances. “It was so well known around the House. Pages passed it along from class to class,” said the former aide, adding that when he was 18 a few years ago and working as an intern, Foley approached him at a bar near the Capitol and asked for his e-mail address.

There were rumors about Foley going back to the House page class of 1995. I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s absolutely mind-boggling that no-one else in the House of Represenatatives heard about any of this, aside from the gay rumors that had been whispered about Foley for years.

Update: I failed to note some more important context and significance to Beck-Heyman’s claims. Foley was elected to Congress as part of the Gingrich Revolution of 1994. He was sworn into office in January of 1995. If Beck-Heyman’s account is correct, that would mean that Foley already had a reputation for hitting on pages and interns within six months of being in Congress.

The Hotline has two separate posts with excellent analysis of how Republicans and Democrats are going to handle their political strategy and message surrounding the Foley scandal. They make extremely accurate points on both sides and I think they’re right on.

I would add that on the Republican side (and the Democrats IF any Democratic members of Congress or aides are implicated in subsequent investigations of the House page program) they need to take some lessons of the past into account.

Look at how past political scandals (Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, Whitewater, House banking, etc.) were handled or mishandled by elected officials and their staffs and political allies. Political and PR consultants will tell you that in any scandal, the best way to defuse it is to get ahead of the story and disclose everything immediately. This gets all the information out at once and would ideally avoid any subsequent revelations or leaks which would give the public and political impression of a cover-up.

As far as accountability goes, the two people I see that are in real political danger over this are Dennis Hastert and Tom Reynolds. Reynolds moves up the food chain in this because Howard Kurtz revealed today that his current chief of staff [who was aware of the original email to the page and was former chief of staff to Mark Foley] tried to talk ABC News out of revealing the damning AOL IM chat transcripts by offering an exclusive interview with Foley. Brian Ross, to his credit, refused to take the deal.

At a minimum, I expect that aide to be out of a job before Election Day, because he just brought the whiff of scandal onto his boss, who is in the middle of a tough re-election campaign which will now draw the attention of the national political press corps. No amount of loyalty or concern for a former boss, mentor, or friend should override political concerns or appearances for your current boss, especially if he’s the House Republican most directly responsible for trying to maintain a GOP majority this fall.

Hastert, as the Speaker of the House and the third-highest ranking politician in the country, is ultimately responsible for anything that goes on in his chamber of Congress. I don’t know about his chances for re-election, but I would say his leadership position in the caucus is in serious jeopardy. A Washington Times editorial called for him to step down as speaker.

Unlike the other major political scandals of the past few years (Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay, Jefferson, Oil for Food, Enron, the CIA leak, NSA warrantless wiretapping, etc.) this is a clear cut issue that ordinary Americans, especially parents, will have no trouble understanding or following. The only thing I might even be able to compare it to is the sex abuse scandal that rocked the Catholic Church a couple of years ago, although there is no evidence yet to suggest Foley’s behavior was a symptom of a much larger institutional problem within the page program and the House of Representatives. The timing of the story could not have been worse for the GOP. It’s a month away from Election Day, which gives plenty of time for the story to grow legs and any other skeletons in the closet to be discovered by the media.

Looking ahead, regardless of who wins on Election Day, expect a more extensive in-depth investigation of the House page program. I don’t know when the House Ethics Committee will have their investigation or preliminary findings done, but I would expect a more aggressive committee like Government Reform to look into it. Given Henry Waxman and Tom Davis’ track record of cooperation and willingness to take up issues in their committee, this would seem to be fodder for them, regardless of which of the two is chairman in January.

Wow.

This just in from Drudge:

WASHINGTON TIMES ON TUESDAY WILL CALL FOR SPEAKER HASTERT’S RESIGNATION, NEWSROOM SOURCES TELL DRUDGE… DEVELOPING… Editorial titled: ‘Resign, Mr. Speaker’: ‘House Speaker Dennis Hastert must do the only right thing, and resign his speakership at once… Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance’… — Washington Times, October 3, 2006…

When the Washington Times is calling for Hastert’s head, the House GOP has a serious problem.

Amid all the Foley and Woodward madness from the past few days, I forgot to look into the Jack Abramoff report and document dump from the House Government Reform Committee that was released last week. While Foley is (rightfully) dominating the headlines right now and could be the most immediate catalyst for a major political scandal to shake up the House leadership, voters and the media should keep their eyes on the other two big scandals on Capitol Hill: Jack Abramoff and Duke Cunningham.

A Daily Kos diarist unearthed this little gem [according to the Committee website, the email files are down but will be posted again soon]

The following is available in doc dump two, page 26:

From: Jack Abramoff
To: ‘octagon1’
Monday, March 18, 2002 8:31 AM
Subject: RE: Sunday

I was sitting yesterday with Karl Rove, Bush’s top advisor, at the NCAA basketball game, discussing Israel when this email came in. I showed it to him. It seems that the President was very sad to have to come out negatively regarding Israel, but that they needed to mollify the Arabs for the upcoming war on Iraq. That did not seem to work anyway. Bush seems to love Sharon and Israel, and thinks Arabfat [sic], is nothing but a liar. I thought I’d pass that on.

Look at the date: March 2002. The significance is astonishing – Jack Abramoff,a private lobbyist with no government security clearances that I know of, knew the United States was going to invade Iraq a full year before the actual invasion itself.

I was working on a long story on the political fallout of the Foley scandal, and it turns out the Washington Post beat me to it in a front page Sunday story written better than anything I had, so I’ll link to their story here.

In less than 24 hours, the Foley resignation has become a full-fledged political scandal on Capitol Hill.

The extent of the problem was first reported by ABC News:

One former page tells ABC News that his class was warned about Foley by people involved in the program.

Other pages told ABC News they were hesitant to report Foley because of his power in Congress.

In essence, the problem was so blatant that pages were being warned about Foley by “people involved in the program.” This means that within the program, it was an unspoken but open secret by people who were in the position to know.

With Foley now out of the picture, news organizations are trying to figure out how long his behavior went on, who it involved, and most significantly, which of his House Republican colleagues knew, or should have known or investigated, the allegations of impropriety.

It is in the last of those three issues where heads much bigger than Foley’s could roll as a result of this scandal.

Because of their knowledge at different points of the allegations against Foley, the big targets of scrutiny in all of this will be:
1) Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert
2) Rep. John Shimkus, chairman of the House Page Board
3) Rep. Tom Reynolds, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee
4) Rep. Rodney Alexander, the congressman who hired the boy that Foley was communicating with.

The question has now extended beyond Foley’s actions, and can be summed up with a paraphrase of Senator Howard Baker’s famous question during the Senate Watergate hearings: What did the House GOP leadership know and when did they know it?

It is very rare to see any Republican violate Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment, but in this case nobody could blame them because no one wants to get pegged as covering up for an Internet sex predator. In the end, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was left holding the Foley hot potato by members of his own caucus.

While Majority Leader John Boehner introduced a resolution to have the House Ethics Committee investigate the Foley matter, and it passed unanimously, other Republicans are being more aggressive.

According to an article in today’s New York Times, Rep. Peter King (R-New York) called for a “full investigation.” Rep. Chris Shays (R-Connecticut) raised the rhetoric, telling the Times, “If they (members of the House GOP leadership) knew or should have known the extent of this problem, they should not serve in leadership.” Shays, in the middle of a tough re-election race in his home district, given the facts we know now is implicitly calling for Hastert to go.

Looking at Hastert’s situation, I’d say it’s unclear how this will affect his re-election prospects. I’ve been unable to find any polls for Hastert’s re-election bid this year, as well as the exit poll results from 2004. I think that his leadership position in the House GOP caucus might be in jeopardy, especially if the GOP loses the majority in the House of Representatives and his handling of the Foley issue winds up being a factor in any GOP losses.

Beyond Hastert, I’d say the other member of Congress who might be in trouble for this is Rep. John Shimkus (R-Illinois), who was filled in on the allegations but did not notify Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Michigan), the only Democrat on the House page board. Given the way it was handled, exclusively within the House GOP caucus with no action taken against Foley, it gives the public and political perception (whether genuine or not) that House Republicans were covering up for Foley for political reasons even though they knew about the allegations for almost a year.

The story could not have come at a worst time for House Republicans – it absolutely dominated the headlines on the last day that Congress was in session, and there is almost a full 5 weeks for any possible scandal to grow legs and bring other people down before Election Day.

One of Josh Marshall’s readers dug up this quote from the St. Petersburg Times:

“It’s vile. It’s more sad than anything else, to see someone with such potential throw it all down the drain because of a sexual addiction.”
–Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), commenting on President Clinton, following release of the Starr Report, September 12, 1998.

On another note – I picked up a copy of Bob Woodward’s new book and am going through it as fast as I can, given that it’s 491 pages long. I’m about 100 pages into it, and I’ll say this much: it will not be on any GOP recommended reading lists during the next 5 weeks before Election Day.

I’ll have more on Foley and Woodward soon.

In less than 24 hours, the Foley resignation has become a full-fledged political scandal on Capitol Hill.

With Foley now out of the picture, news organizations are trying to figure out how long his behavior went on, who it involved, and most significantly, which of his House Republican colleagues knew, or should have known or investigated, the allegations of impropriety.

It is in the last of those three issues where heads much bigger than Foley’s could roll as a result of this scandal.

Because of their knowledge at different points of the allegations against Foley, the big targets of scrutiny in all of this will be:
1) Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert
2) Rep. John Shinkus, chairman of the House Page Board
3) Rep. Tom Reynolds, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC)
4) Rep. Rodney Alexander, the congressman who hired the boy that Foley was communicating with.

House Majority Leader John Boehner pointed the finger directly at Dennis Hastert. From the Washington Post:

The resignation rocked the Capitol, and especially Foley’s GOP colleagues, as lawmakers were rushing to adjourn for at least six weeks. House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post last night that he had learned this spring of some “contact” between Foley and a 16-year-old page. Boehner said he told House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), and that Hastert assured him “we’re taking care of it.”

It was not immediately clear what actions Hastert took. His spokesman had said earlier that the speaker did not know of the sexually charged e-mails between Foley and the boy.