The House ethics committee released the results of its three-month investigation into sexually suggestive e-mails sent by former Republican congressman Mark Foley to male congressional pages. The bipartisan panel found that Republican lawmakers and staffers were negligent, but said no lawmaker should be punished.
What began with a frenzy of allegations, fueled by explicit communications and accompanied by outrage, ended Friday with something less than a slap on the wrist.
The ethics investigative subcommittee conducted more than 50 interviews, including with House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Republican leader John Boehner and countless aides. But in the end, the three Republicans and three Democrats on the subpanel found that while Republican leaders failed to protect underage pages, no rules were broken.
Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), the ethics committee's chairman, said, "We recognize that doing the right thing in a sensitive situation can be very hard.... But simply put, in situations such as the one described in our report, doing the right thing is the only acceptable option."
Foley was found to have sent a series of often sexually explicit e-mails and instant messages to male congressional pages, most of them minors, over a period of several years.
When the communications began appearing on the Internet, Foley resigned his seat Sept. 29, in the midst of the fall campaign.
Then it became clear that Republican leaders knew of Foley's conduct at least several months before it became public, and the ethics panel probe was launched to determine who knew what when.
According to the panel's 89-page report, Boehner testified that he found out about some of the less-explicit Foley e-mails.
Boehner learned of the e-mails during a brief conversation one day on the House floor, and responded by saying words to the effect of "OK, we will handle it." Boehner said he told Hastert of the issue within half an hour, also on the House floor, and that Hastert told him it had been taken care of. Hastert testified he had no recollection of the conversation.
The report also says Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) -- who was chairman of the Congressional Page Board -- said he had not told the Democratic member on the panel of Foley's e-mails because "he's a Democrat and I was afraid it would be blown out of proportion."
While the report didn't recommend additional proceedings against anyone, it said there were "a significant number of instances where members or employees failed to exercise appropriate diligence and oversight." There was a "disconcerting unwillingness to take responsibility for resolving issues" regarding Foley's conduct, the report said.
Critics see the whole exercise as a whitewash. Melanie Sloan is executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
"I think the American public is going to read this report and be shocked that even knowing all these members knew about this problem, the ethics committee decided that nobody did anything wrong -- it was just negligence," Sloan said. "I think that people will be very upset by that conclusion."
Sloan and others say the failure of the committee to find any violations of House rules points to the need for an outside office of public integrity to handle ethics complaints.
But the senior Democrat on the ethics panel, Rep. Howard Berman of California, defended his colleagues' work.
"I stand by this report," Berman said. "This is not the jerry-rigged result of a series of compromises, but rather the right report on this subject."
In the November election, the Republican running for Foley's open seat was defeated, and analysts say the Foley scandal played a role in the GOP's loss of its congressional majority. So it can be argued that Republicans as a party paid a price for the Foley matter, even if no one individually was held to account.
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