Tuesday, December 12, 2006; A06

Pelosi Set to Take Steps To Protect House Pages

Speaker-to-be Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said yesterday that she will take legislative steps to better protect House pages after the scandal involving a congressman who sent salacious e-mails to former pages.

Pelosi said in a statement that legislation would be introduced early in the new Congress to increase oversight of the page program, require regular meetings of the page board and add a parent of a current and a former page to the board.

"The Page School is a national treasure, and the young people who attend it and work in the Congress are our special trust," she said. "We must do all we can to protect them."

Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) resigned in September after it was revealed that he had sent e-mails and other electronic messages with sexually graphic topics to male former pages.

For a semester during high school, the approximately 70 House pages and 30 Senate pages live in a Capitol Hill dormitory, attend classes in the morning and help out in Congress during the day, mainly as messengers.

A federal judge all but resolved the legal battle over classified information in the CIA leak case, helping ensure that the dispute would not derail former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby's perjury and obstruction trial.

U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton accepted Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald's proposal to limit the details that Libby and his attorneys can discuss. The details of those limitations are sealed.

Libby's trial is to begin next month. He is accused of lying to investigators about his conversations with reporters regarding a CIA operative. He said he had more pressing issues on his mind and wants to bolster that argument by raising classified intelligence about terrorist threats and foreign nuclear programs in court.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.) violated ethics standards by giving reporters access to an illegally taped telephone call involving Republican leaders a decade ago, the House ethics committee said.

McDermott, who at the time was the ethics panel's senior Democrat, failed to meet his obligations as a committee leader, according to a report released two days after Congress adjourned for the year. The panel took no action other than issuing the report.

The complaint, filed in November 2004, stems from a tape recording given to McDermott in January 1997. The tape recorded then-Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) in a conference call with GOP leaders regarding a separate ethics investigation of Gingrich.

McDermott leaked the tape to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the New York Times, which published stories on the case.

-- From News Services