Attorney Says Lawmaker Never Tried to Have Sex With a Minor
By Charles Babington and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, October 4, 2006
Disgraced former lawmaker Mark Foley's behavior was affected by alcoholism and childhood molestation but he "never attempted to have sexual contact with a minor," his attorney said yesterday in the first extensive defense of the Florida Republican's actions, which have rocked Congress and the GOP.
The comments came as embattled House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) turned to conservative radio hosts to defend his handling of the Foley matter, and rank-and-file House Republicans took a wait-and-see approach on their leader's fate. President Bush praised Hastert, but the House's second-ranking Republican challenged the speaker's account of how the scandal unfolded.
Lawyer David Roth told reporters in Florida that Foley was intoxicated when he sent lewd electronic messages to former House pages but was always sober when conducting official business during his 12 years in Congress. Roth said he could not explain new reports of an exchange in which Foley appeared to be having Internet sex with a youth while participating in a House roll-call vote.
Roth also said that Foley is gay, and that when Foley was 13 to 15 years old he was abused by a clergyman. Foley, who is single and Roman Catholic, will fully cooperate with law enforcement officers and will preserve all records, e-mails and other items they might want to review, Roth said. "Nothing will be altered," he said.
Foley, 52, abruptly resigned his seat Friday and checked into an alcohol-treatment facility in Florida.
While Roth was speaking to reporters, federal agents were interviewing former House pages and trying to determine whether Foley crossed state lines to have sex with minors or enticed minors to travel across state lines for a sexual encounter, law enforcement officials said. The widening investigation comes amid reports of electronic messages in which Foley appeared to refer to past or future meetings with former pages, in Washington and other cities.
The investigation is being run by the FBI's Washington Field Office, with close supervision from the Cyber Division and other senior officials at FBI headquarters, said an official speaking on background. Other FBI field offices -- including the one in Miami that covers Foley's home district -- are involved in chasing specific leads and conducting local interviews, the official said.
While federal authorities began their investigation, the debate over the GOP's handling of the Foley matter raged on. The Washington Times's conservative editorial page called on Hastert to resign the speakership. It joined other critics in saying that Hastert and a few lieutenants tried to smother a 2005 complaint about Foley instead of opening inquiries that might have uncovered raunchier exchanges in 2003 with teenagers who had spent a semester on Capitol Hill.
Hastert turned to half a dozen friendly talk-radio hosts to repeat his argument that the early warnings did not justify punishing Foley or launching an internal investigation of his conduct. They involved e-mails in 2005 from Foley asking a Louisiana boy for his birthday wishes and a photograph, which alarmed the youth and his parents. Moreover, Hastert told Rush Limbaugh, "We did not know what the text of that message was because the parents held it and they didn't want it revealed."
Few Republican House members -- who control Hastert's fate -- made comments for or against the speaker. Majority Leader John A. Boehner (Ohio) told a Cincinnati radio station that he spoke to Hastert this spring of the early concerns about Foley, one of two such reported conversations that Hastert says he does not recall. "My position is it's in his corner, it's his responsibility," Boehner said.
Later, Boehner issued a letter saying that Hastert should not resign. Reps. Henry A. Hyde (R-Ill.) and John Shadegg (R-Ariz.) also wrote letters supporting Hastert, but they were not co-signed by colleagues, as such letters often are.
Bush, in his first comments about the scandal, condemned Foley's behavior and praised Hastert but refused to take questions about whether he agrees with conservatives who have called on the speaker to resign his post. "I was disgusted by the revelations and disappointed that he [Foley] would violate the trust of the citizens who placed him in office," Bush said at an elementary school during a campaign swing in California.
The president, endorsing the investigations by the FBI and Congress, called Hastert "a father, teacher, coach who cares about the children of this country," who wants "all the facts to come out" while protecting the young people in the page program.
Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman offered an endorsement and rejected calls for Hastert to resign. "I support the speaker," he said in a telephone interview from California. "He's a good man. He's taken a very serious situation incredibly seriously and I think we need to figure out everything about this, including whether prosecution is warranted."
Republican strategists, worried about how the scandal will affect GOP candidates in the Nov. 7 midterm elections, said they hope Bush's public comments will help quell anger among conservatives about how the leadership has handled the matter.
"A loss has already taken place, and I don't think you can get that back," said one strategist, who asked not to be identified in order to speak candidly about the party's problems. "It's damage control and picking up the pieces from here. The president doing this today can be helpful."
A source close to Hastert said he thinks the speaker and the party at large are pulling past the worst of the damage. "The speaker is hearing from [GOP] members that we're all in this together," said the source, who would discuss the conversations only on background.
ABC News, which first reported the graphic instant messages, posted a new electronic exchange yesterday in which Foley allegedly had simulated sex with a former page during a 15-minute House vote in 2003.
Debates raged on the Web and elsewhere over the degree to which closeted and open gays in Washington knew of Foley's interest in teenage boys, and whether such knowledge extended to wider circles. Former Capitol Police chief Terrance W. Gainer said: "During my four years [as chief], I was totally unaware of any such allegation. And had I been, I would have opened a case."
One congressional source, meanwhile, said the FBI inquiry could put legislators in an awkward position if tips prompt agents to seek computer records or other items from lawmakers' offices. Five months ago, many House members protested an FBI raid on the office of Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-La.) as part of a public corruption investigation.
In his late-afternoon news conference, Roth said Foley "does not blame the trauma he sustained as a young adolescent for his totally inappropriate e-mails and IMs," or instant messages. "He continues to offer no excuse whatsoever for his conduct."
He said Foley "kept his shame to himself for almost 40 years. Specifically, Mark has asked that you be told that between the ages of 13 and 15 he was molested by a clergyman." Roth declined to name the clergyman's religion.
A coalition of conservative, pro-family groups issued a statement expressing concern that House leaders had not moved aggressively when first informed about the e-mail between Foley and the Louisiana youth.
The groups' leaders said they are concerned that the "integrity of the conservative majority has given way to political correctness, trading the virtues of decency and respect for that of tolerance and diversity." The statement stopped short of joining in the calls for Hastert to step aside and did not mention anyone from either party by name.
Staff writers Allan Lengel, Dan Eggen, Mary Beth Sheridan and Sari Horwitz contributed to this report.
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