The National Journal has a story on the political and social dilemma of gay Republicans in the wake of the Mark Foley scandal, which is well worth taking the time to read.
Update: Andrew Sullivan has this post, which begins with Pelosi’s role in the Foley scandal, but goes on a tangent about politically active gays from both sides of the spectrum in DC. Also worth reading.
Lots of activity today…
Yesterday, I said that I didn’t think Dennis Hastert’s leadership position was in any immediate jeopardy until prominent congressional Republicans began calling for him to go, particularly 2008 hopefuls.
I am now reassessing that comment, following a report by Fox News today on an internal GOP poll which does not bode well for them.
WASHINGTON — House Republican candidates will suffer massive losses if House Speaker Dennis Hastert remains speaker until Election Day, according to internal polling data from a prominent GOP pollster, FOX News has learned.
“The data suggests Americans have bailed on the speaker,” a Republican source briefed on the polling data told FOX News. “And the difference could be between a 20-seat loss and 50-seat loss.”
My guess for Fox’s source is a member of Congress or an associate who has been critical of the leadership and wants to clean house before a tough election (i.e. Chris Shays) or someone with possible leadership ambitions who sees an opening. Either way, both of them would have the means and the motive to subtly nudge Hastert out the door by leaking word about this poll in hopes he gets the hint and doesn’t take the rest of the party down with him.
ABC News continues to own the story. Two days ago they revealed this shocker:
Former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) interrupted a vote on the floor of the House in 2003 to engage in Internet sex with a high school student who had served as a congressional page, according to new Internet instant messages provided to ABC News by former pages.
Today, they found more skeletons in Foley’s closet:
Three more former congressional pages have come forward to reveal what they call “sexual approaches” over the Internet from former Congressman Mark Foley.
The pages served in the classes of 1998, 2000 and 2002. They independently approached ABC News after the Foley resignation through the Brian Ross & the Investigative Team’s tip line on ABCNews.com. None wanted their names used because of the sensitive nature of the communications.
It all goes downhill from there – more raunchy comments and e-mails from Foley.
The House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to open an investigation into how lawmakers and congressional staffers handled the Foley allegations, creating a new subcommittee and issuing over four dozen subpoenas for testimony and documents. Committee chairman Doc Hastings declined to name names but I think it would be fair to assume that Dennis Hastert is one of them.
Separately, former Foley/Reynolds aide Kirk Fordham was interviewed today by the FBI as part of its investigation.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi deep-sixed a proposal by Hastert to have ex-FBI director Louis Freeh look into the page program:
Hastert had hoped to announce the bipartisan appointment of former FBI director Louis J. Freeh to look into ways to improve the page program, in which teenagers live in a Capitol Hill dorm and attend a special school. But when he called Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) early in the afternoon, she declined to go along with the plan.
Pelosi saw the Freeh proposal as a ploy to burnish the GOP’s image, aides said. She told the speaker that investigators should examine whether existing rules and procedures were followed before the House considers new rules, the aides said.
Finally, an interesting note: ABC News broke the first story about the Foley e-mail one week ago today. Who would have guessed what a firestorm that story would unleash within a week? This story has become Watergate in a microwave.
Slate has this interesting story on how three high-profile public figures caught up in scandal can or have used alcoholism as an excuse to try to generate sympathy and possibly [at least in Mel Gibson’s case] a career comeback. Check it out.
Before we get to today’s developments, I’m going to quote this little nugget I wrote, from the Department of Hate to Say I Told You So:
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.
Well it happened – Kirk Fordham quit his job as chief of staff to the now-embattled Congressman Tom Reynolds, and admitted he was resigning essentially for the reasons I wrote yesterday.
Like so many, I feel betrayed by Mark Foley’s indefensible behavior. Again, I will not allow the Democrats to make me a political issue in my boss’s race, and I will fully cooperate with the ongoing investigation.”
That might have been the end of it, if House Republicans hadn’t decided to make him their fall guy:
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.
As I wrote previously, no one wants to be pegged as helping to cover up for an Internet sex predator and be the one holding the Foley hot potato when it’s all over, and sensing he was being made a scapegoat, Fordham decided to drop a massive bombshell on Dennis Hastert:
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.
Not surprisingly, this has turned into an all-out feud between Fordham and Hastert’s office, each accusing the other of lying. CNN has a good recap of the back and forth accusations flying around here. I hope they all get their stories straight before the federal investigators start knocking on doors and asking for statements.
This scandal is radioactive to anyone it touches. My guess is that if anyone else is going to get tossed over the side in the days and weeks ahead, it will be the current and former Hastert aides who were warned by Fordham in 2004, assuming that Fordham’s story checks out.
Although more people have called for Hastert to resign, I’m not sure he’s going to since the scandal as it relates to his own leadership position has not reached a critical mass within his own caucus yet. When big name House and Senate Republicans, particularly any with presidential ambitions for 2008, start calling for Hastert to go, that’s when I’ll say stick a fork in him.
If Hastert decides to buckle down and wait it out, which by all indications appears to be his chosen course of action for the moment, and more revelations trickle out to the media about who knew and what they did about it, Hastert will arguably become the Democrats’ biggest political piñata for the next four weeks. You can already see this strategy in action in this entry at Daily Kos, which tracks how several Democratic congressional candidates have already incorporated the Foley scandal into their campaign attacks.
Stay tuned, this one is not over by a long shot.
Update: Reuters has a story on this:
A senior party aide said House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who oversees the congressional intern program at the center of the scandal, could be forced out after the November 7 elections, instead of immediately, as has been urged by some critics. Hastert has said he intends to stay on the job.
“Looks like right now he will keep his job for a maximum of one and one-half months,” said a top party aide, adding that in the meantime Hastert may fire some staffers. Other aides said it remained unclear how long he would stay.
ABC News did three stories on Foley-gate tonight, all worth checking out.
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: SundayI 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.
Icepicks and Nukes 