House Speaker
Dennis Hastert is getting backup from President Bush and
other Republican Party luminaries after vowing not to resign
over his handling of the unfolding congressional page
cybersex scandal, even as more pages approached by
Foley came forward. ''He really ought not be a
sacrificial lamb,'' former secretary of state James Baker
III said Friday.
President Bush called Hastert late Thursday to
reassure him amid allegations that the House speaker
did not do enough to protect the teenage House pages
from former representative Mark Foley's advances.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., issued a
statement Thursday night supporting Hastert. And
Bush's father, the former president Bush, spoke up for
him during an ABC News interview.
The boost comes after a week of wavering support
from House Republicans in the wake of revelations that
Foley, R-Fla., had been sending inappropriate e-mails
to teenage pages for years. Hastert had blamed
Democrats for the election-season revelations but on
Thursday abruptly changed course and took
responsibility for the matter.
Hastert vowed not to resign over his office's
handling of the scandal. ''I haven't done anything
wrong,'' he said--but it has cost Republicans in
public-opinion polls.
''I'm deeply sorry this has happened, and the
bottom line is, we're taking responsibility,'' Hastert
said at a news conference outside his district office
in Batavia, Ill. That seemed to quiet rumblings about
Hastert's resignation as the week drew to a close and House
and Justice Department officials launched separate investigations.
On CBS's The Early Show, Baker said
Hastert deserves credit for urging a probe of a sex
scandal in the shadow of the midterm elections. And he
offered a pragmatic reason for the party to stand by him.
''If they throw Denny Hastert off the sled to
slow down the wolves, it won't be long before you'll
be crying, 'Hey, you've got to throw somebody else
over because they knew about it too,' '' Baker said.
The bipartisan ethics panel met Thursday for the
first time, approving nearly four dozen subpoenas for
witnesses and documents regarding improper conduct
between lawmakers and current and former pages, and who
may have known about it. Ethics committee chairman Doc
Hastings, R-Wash., would not say whether Hastert was
among those subpoenaed.
The ethics committee's senior Democrat, Rep.
Howard Berman of California, said the investigation
should take ''weeks, not months.'' Hastings and Berman
will conduct the investigation along with representatives
Stephanie Tubbs Jones, D-Ohio, and Judith Biggert, R-Ill.,
whose district is next to Hastert's.
While the committee--officially the
Committee on Standards of Official Conduct--is
investigating potential violations of House rules, the
Justice Department appeared to be moving with dispatch
in its criminal investigation. There's plenty to investigate.
ABC News reported that three more pages, one
each from 1998, 2000, and 2002, have come forward
detailing sexual approaches from Foley over the
Internet. The FBI has contacted a former congressional page
from Kentucky as part of the burgeoning investigation,
said Daniel London, chief of staff to Rep. Ron Lewis,
R-Ky., who sponsored the teen.
Attorneys for the Justice Department and the
House negotiated on how to give investigators access
to Foley's files without inciting a legal battle like
the one after the FBI raided the office of Rep. William
Jefferson, D-La., earlier this year.
Ex-Foley chief of staff Kirk Fordham met
with the FBI. Fordham emerged as a key figure
Wednesday when he told reporters that he had talked three
years ago with top aides to Hastert about Foley's conduct
with pages.
Fordham's version directly contradicts an
account issued by Hastert's office on Saturday, saying
the speaker's staff only learned of an
''over-friendly'' e-mail exchange between Foley and a single
page. Hastert's top aide, Scott Palmer, denies that
Fordham warned top GOP aides of Foley and
inappropriate conduct with other pages.
Foley, 52, stepped down September 29 after
he was confronted with sexually explicit electronic
messages he had sent teenage male pages;
he promptly checked into an alcohol rehabilitation
clinic. Through his lawyer, he has said he is gay but
denied any sexual contact with minors.
Hastert, meanwhile, is holding to his assertion
that he did not know about messages sent by Foley to a
former House page until the scandal broke last week.
He issued a less than ringing endorsement of his staff
and Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., chairman of the board that
overseas the page program.
Shimkus admonished Foley to cease contact with
the former page, a Louisiana teen. The matter ended
there instead of being pursued in a way that might
have led to the far more lurid messages sent to other former pages.
''Could we have done it better? Could the page
board have handled it better? In retrospect, probably
yes,'' Hastert said. ''But at the time what we knew
and what we acted upon was what we had.''
Added Hastert: ''I don't know who knew what,
when.... If it's members of my staff that didn't do
the job, we will act appropriately.'' (Andrew Taylor,
AP)
