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(Photo: AP (file))
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Foley, a congressman from Florida, abruptly quit Congress on Friday, Sept. 29, 2006, after reports surfaced that he'd sent sexually charged electronic messages to boys working as congressional pages.
The disclosure sent House Republicans into damage control mode amid charges by Democrats that some House leaders may have known for months about Foley's inappropriate overtures toward the young pages.
House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., in a letter sent to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, asked the Justice Department to "conduct an investigation of Mr. Foley's conduct with current and former House pages."
Ironically, Foley, who is 52 and single, could be found to have violated a law that he helped to write as co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus.
"Republican leaders have admitted to knowing about Mr. Foley's outrageous behavior for six months to a year, and they chose to cover it up rather than to protect these children," said House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California.
Rep. Thomas Reynolds of New York, head of the House Republican election effort, said he told Hastert months before about the allegations involving a 16-year-old boy from Louisiana.
Congressional pages, a staple of Washington politics since the 1820s, are high school students who serve as gofers in the House and Senate.
Hastert acknowledged that his staff had been made aware of concerns about what they termed "over-friendly" e-mails Foley had sent to the teenager — including one requesting his picture — in the fall of 2005, and that they referred the matter to the House clerk.
But Hastert said those e-mails were not viewed as "sexual in nature" and that he was not aware of "a different set of communications which were sexually explicit ... which Mr. Foley reportedly sent another former page or pages."
A report released on Dec. 9, 2006, by the
ethics committee into the election-year scandal found Republican lawmakers and aides left male pages
vulnerable to Foley's improper sexual advances even
though the first concerns surfaced more than a decade ago.
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