House Ethics Committee Investigates Mark Foley E-mail Scandal

Well, five hours is a long time to be behind closed doors.

BEN PERSHING, Senior Editor, Roll Call: It certainly is.

RAY SUAREZ: Do we know anything about what was said in committee today?

BEN PERSHING: We know very little. There was some leaks before the meeting about what Fordham was expected to say, and he was expected to reconfirm what he's been saying publicly, which is that he told Scott Palmer, Dennis Hastert's chief of staff, in 2003 or 2002 that Mark Foley had a problem with pages and that something needed to be done about it.

He said that a week ago, and he was expected to say it again at the Ethics Committee and, from what we gather, was expected to, as he said, demonstrate that this happened. Now, that's key, because at this point there's no evidence that that meeting took place, and Palmer himself has denied that the meeting took place.

RAY SUAREZ: Is this sealed, secret, like a grand jury, or does it just take place away from the wandering eye, the intrusive eye of the press?

BEN PERSHING: I'm not sure what the legal requirement is. Traditionally, the Ethics Committee does operate in secret. There are very few leaks out of that committee, which is unusual for Capitol Hill, as you know. Usually everything leaks. But both parties usually take it very seriously. They don't leak what was said and who said it. And they think it's important to the integrity of the committee that things stay secret.

BEN PERSHING: There are several, really. I mean, the first question is, what exactly did Foley do? And the FBI is investigating that element of it.

But the real question is, how many pages did he have relationships with? What were the nature of those relationships? Did they go beyond electronic messages, or was there actual physical meetings and contacts with some of them? How old were they when it happened? Were laws broken?

And then, on Capitol Hill, the question is, how long ago did other members and House officials know that this was a problem, and what did they do about it? And the real question here is, did several people in responsible positions know about this and, for various reasons, just choose not to act on it?

RAY SUAREZ: Well, Kirk Fordham was chief of staff to Foley himself and then to Congressman Reynolds of New York...

BEN PERSHING: Right, yes.

RAY SUAREZ: ... two people now intimately involved in this story. But is his version of events already being publicly contradicted by other people who've spoken on this matter?

BEN PERSHING: Fordham's version of events has only been contradicted by Speaker Hastert's office. And Scott Palmer, Speaker Hastert's long-time chief of staff, has said this did not happen. He says he did not meet with Kirk Fordham in 2002 or 2003, did not discuss with Fordham any problem with Foley and pages.

And there's a real contradiction between those two stories. We have not yet seen real evidence that it did happen, nor has Palmer produced any evidence to suggest why it couldn't have happened. It's theoretically possible that one or the other of them has a faulty memory, although you would think this is something pretty significant and not something you would forget about.

RAY SUAREZ: There are several sets of communications, apparently.

BEN PERSHING: Yes.

RAY SUAREZ: E-mails and IM, instant message logs, and they -- different sets of pages involved who were in service at the time, still younger teenagers, and older people who had phased out of the program. Is that an important distinction, as we learn more about this?

BEN PERSHING: I think it will be an important distinction legally. And I'm not a lawyer, but I do know in every state there's different laws about age of consent, about when people can have sexual contact. And if some of these pages were 18 or 19, it's entirely possible that Mark Foley didn't break any laws.

On the other hand, beyond state laws, there are federal laws now on the books -- ironically, some of which Mark Foley helped write and pass -- that restrict what can be sent over the Internet, that restrict obscene messages being sent over the Internet to minors. So the question is, how do you define a minor? How old were they? And, you know, were they of an age when they can responsibly have a relationship like this?

BEN PERSHING: Well, I think she's taking some heat back home. She is on the page board. There are three members of Congress who are on the page board, two Republicans and one Democrat, and Capito was not informed of this issue in late 2005. The only person on the page board who was informed, as far as we know, is the chairman of that committee, and that's John Shimkus of Illinois.

He didn't inform either Capito or the Democrat on the committee -- that's Dale Kildee of Michigan -- he didn't inform either of them about this. He and the clerk of the House, as far as we know, went to Foley and confronted him about this first set of non-explicit e-mails and asked him to stop contacting this page.

Now, what Capito is getting back home is her Democratic opponent saying, "She covered this up. Why didn't she know? Why isn't she protecting children?" And she felt like she had to go out and make clear she didn't know about this and that she's disgusted by it.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, here's one congresswoman back-pedaling, putting some distance between herself and the issue. Is it sending out that kind of ripples into a lot of campaigns?

BEN PERSHING: It is. There are fair number of campaigns -- you're seeing Republican candidates all over the place make clear that they're disgusted by this scandal, that anyone who covered it up should be held to account. They're not going so far as to call for Speaker Hastert to resign or anything like that, but you're seeing a lot of campaigns -- in Minnesota this happened in the Senate race, in Tom Reynolds' race in upstate New York in particular. The Democrats have really seized on this issue and are attacking Republicans for it.

RAY SUAREZ: Now, is the committee -- and here they've opened their -- they've been doing these question sessions -- are they a finder of fact? If it comes down to, "he said, he said," in putting together the chronology, putting together some conclusions, will they, in fact, come down on one side or the other of what went wrong or who was to blame?

BEN PERSHING: They typically do. I mean, this is a complicated issue. It's possible they could find gray area or, if you have a case where you have no evidence to back up one side or the other of a "he said, she said" story, it's possible it could be gray.

But normally what this committee does is, when they do reach a conclusion, which can sometimes take a while, they're usually pretty conclusive. They say, "This committee finds that x, y, or z happened," and either it was a flat-out violation of House rules or, more importantly, they can say a member has brought discredit to the House, brought dishonor to the House as an institution. And that's not a formal sanction, but it is serious.

RAY SUAREZ: Ben Pershing from Roll Call. Thanks for joining us.

BEN PERSHING: Thanks for having me.