A few weeks ago, when Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) first acknowledged breaking the law, he blamed his alcoholism and skedaddled to a rehab facility.

More than a few readers cried foul. For one thing, who knew this guy was a lush? they asked. (We checked, and the answer was "a lot," at least among Capitol Hill denizens.)

A smaller number of readers thought this rehab gambit was a way to trim his eventual jail sentence. When at Ney's guilty pleading yesterday his lawyer, Mark Tuohey, specifically asked the judge that Ney be considered for a treatment program while incarcerated, I began to wonder if they were right.

So I checked the Bureau of Prisons Web site, and guess what? It looks like our readers were onto something.

"Non-violent inmates who are diagnosed with a substance use disorder may be eligible for up to a year off his/her sentence," the site says. And in certain prisons, inmates with substance abuse problems can be placed in a separate residential treatment program which keeps them apart from the general inmate population.

That's a good lawyer you've got there, Bob.

The LA Times broke the story back in 2004 that Rep. Curt Weldon's (R-PA) daughter Karen, then in her late twenties, ran a lobbying firm that was raking in approximately $1 million a year - and by some strange coincidence, her three main clients all had developed a relationship with her father, Curt.

Now McClatchy breaks news that the FBI opened an investigation of the matter in recent months. Just out:

The Justice Department is investigating whether Republican Rep. Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania traded his political influence for lucrative lobbying and consulting contracts for his daughter, according to sources with direct knowledge of the inquiry.

The FBI, which opened an investigation in recent months, has formally referred the matter to the department's Public Integrity Section for additional scrutiny. At issue are Weldon's efforts between 2002 and 2004 to aid two Russian companies and two Serbian brothers with ties to strongman Slobodan Milosevic, a federal law enforcement official said....

But McClatchy Newspapers' sources said the FBI only over the last few months obtained evidence suggesting that the congressman may have broken the law. One of the sources, a federal law enforcement official, said that Weldon had not yet been told about the inquiry.

The official said that the FBI recently sought the assistance of federal prosecutors in pressuring an unidentified person to provide evidence about the 59-year-old congressman. The attempt to "squeeze" this individual appeared to be an early step, the two sources said.

It is uncertain whether the current investigation will blossom into a full-blown inquiry that will result in criminal charges being filed. It is possible at this stage of the investigation that nothing will come of it. But the FBI typically does not seek the involvement of the Justice Department unless it finds substance to the evidence it has gathered.

Weldon is locked in a tight re-election race with retired Vice Adm. Joe Sestak.

More evidence of less-than-savory ties between Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) and Jack Abramoff.

As The Sacramento Bee noted this morning, a newly released email shows that in 2000, Abramoff and Doolittle spoke about getting Doolittle's wife, Julie, a job with a friend's nonprofit.

What the paper didn't reveal is that Abramoff had cut a similar deal for another favored contact: former DeLay aide Tony Rudy. Far from helping out a pal's wife, Abramoff appears to have used the arrangements to funnel bribes to powerful men, like DeLay and Rudy. And Doolittle.

The e-mail, released as part of a Senate report yesterday, provides even further grounds for suspicion of the relationship between Abramoff and Doolittle.

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After reporting yesterday that lawyers for Jose Padilla accused government interrogators of forcing their client to take drugs similar to LSD or PCP, more than a few people wondered if I had been slipped a couple tabs myself.

"I'm aware that this sort of thing is all too credible to those of us - excuse me; those of you - who hold the belief that the Bush Administration is the sum total of human evil in the universe," wrote Moe Lane at RedState.com. "But stuff like the TPMuckraker article is just silly, and unless you've got funny brain chemistry, it's preventable silliness. Get a grip."

One has to admit, the author has a point. Giving detainees drugs like LSD and PCP seems stupid to the point of absurdity.

So I was surprised to discover that in 2002, Justice Department lawyers carefully considered the issue and advised the White House that it was okay. In their view, it was acceptable to force detainees to ingest "mind-altering substances," as long as it was not intended to cause months-long bouts of serious mental illness.

How do we know that? Because in August 2002, the Justice Department gave then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales a 50-page document saying so. And a follow-up document in 2004 reaffirmed it.

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The House Republican leadership released a statement today saying that if Rep. Bob Ney (R-OH) doesn't resign by the time Congress reconvenes after the election, then they will "move to expel him immediately."

But Bob's taking his time. His lawyer said this morning he won't be stepping down for a "few weeks," because he's got some housekeeping to do.

That "housekeeping" may include picking up a final Congressional paycheck: As Roll Call points out, "House employees get paid on the first of every month, so if Ney remains in his seat until at least Nov. 1, he will receive one final paycheck of more than $13,000."

As if to emphasize that he still feels very much a part of Congress, it appears that Ney wore his Congressional lapel pin to his plea hearing. The pin is what members use to identify themselves to Capitol Police.

Is a second GOP congressman getting drawn into the House page scandal? NBC reports:

Federal prosecutors in Arizona have opened a preliminary investigation of a camping trip Congressman Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., took 10 years ago that included two teenage congressional pages, a Justice Department spokesman told NBC News.

A spokesman for the Justice Department in Washington said that the U.S. attorney in Arizona has started a "preliminary assessment" of the trip, after an unidentified source made allegations about the congressman's behavior on the expedition. . . .

One participant, who requested anonymity, said he was uncomfortable with the attention Kolbe paid to one of the former pages. He was "creeped out by it," he said, adding that there was a lot of "fawning, petting and touching" on the teenager's arms, shoulders and back by Kolbe. . . .

Kolbe's office issued a statement to NBC News denying that anything improper had happened. "The rafting trip back in 1996 consisted of five current staff, two former pages, and his sister," a spokeswoman for Kolbe said. "There is absolutely no basis and no truth to any [allegations of] inappropriate behavior."

Kolbe, who is gay, had not acknowledged his homosexuality at the time of the trip. He was once a member of the House Page Board. He's retiring from Congress at the end of this year.

We're not clear on what NBC is calling a "preliminary investigation," by the way. Typically, anything short of a formal investigation is referred to as an "inquiry" by the FBI.

So Bob Ney says, "I never acted to enrich myself or to get things I shouldn’t, but over time, I allowed myself get too comfortable with the way things have been done in Washington, D.C. for too long."

Never? On the score of trying to "enrich [himself]" and "get things [he] shouldn't," I think Ney's acceptance of "thousands of dollars worth of gambling chips" from Syrian-born businessman and notorious gambling man Fouad "The Fat Man" al-Zayat might qualify. In his guilty plea, Ney admitted to accepting the chips for a couple high-flying nights in a London casino. With Zayat's help, Ney walked away with "more than $50,000."

Because Ney wanted more money than he was willing to publicly declare when he re-entered the country, he had one of his staffers tell U.S. Customs that $5,000 of it was his -- Ney then re-collected the money once they were safely back in the country.

In return for Zayat's generosity, Ney helped Zayat get a U.S. travel visa. And since Zayat had a company that was seeking to sell U.S.-made airplanes and airplane parts to Iran, Ney also tried to get an exemption to U.S. laws that ban the sale of such parts to Iran.

I guess that's what Ney means by getting "too comfortable with the way things have been done in Washington?"

In a statement issued after his guilty plea today, Bob Ney said that he was "[accepting] responsibility," but then explained, "I never acted to enrich myself or to get things I shouldn’t, but over time, I allowed myself get too comfortable with the way things have been done in Washington, D.C. for too long."

He also seemed to indicate that he wasn't a totally willing participant in Jack Abramoff's "schemes," saying "I accepted things I shouldn’t have with the result that Jack Abramoff used my name to advance his own secret schemes of fraud and theft in ways I could never have imagined."

Full statement below the jump...

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Rep. Bob Ney's lawyer Mark Tuohey said in court this morning during his guilty plea hearing that Ney will not be resigning from Congress immediately -- but rather "in the next few weeks."

Tuohey said the delay came because Ney had some “constituent issues he wanted to tie up” and also wanted to ease the transition for his congressional staff. Tuohey didn't offer a specific date. Ney himself did not speak during the hearing, except to say "Yes" or "No," or "I plead guilty, your honor."

The judge set Ney's sentencing for January 19th. Ney faces a maximum of ten years, but prosecutors have said that they'll recommend a sentence of 27 months.

Tuohey also asked that Ney be considered for alcohol treatment while in prison. Ney's been in an alcohol rehab facility since he pled guilty September 15.

"Rep. Bob Ney (R-Ohio) will formally resign from the House today, according to two House GOP sources," Roll Call reports.

The speculation has been that he would resign today, in a bid to convince the judge how very sorry he is for his crimes (or maybe he did get the hint). Justin will have more later from the scene at the courthouse.

Abramoff Figure Rep. Ney to Plead Guilty... And Resign from Congress?
"Pressed by Republican House colleagues to resign, Rep. Bob Ney is the first congressman to fall in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling case, a controversy that has reached the Bush White House and Capitol Hill....

"Ney signed papers a month ago admitting to charges of conspiracy and making false statements, acknowledging that he had deprived the public of his honest services.

"The Ohio congressman says he took tens of thousands of dollars worth of trips, sports tickets, campaign contributions, meals and casino chips in exchange for legislation and public statements supporting Abramoff's clients and a foreign businessman.

"With the Justice Department recommending 27 months behind bars for Ney, the congressman may announce his decision to step down when he appears before U.S. District Judge Ellen S. Huvelle, an appointee of
President Clinton.

"Longtime Washington lawyer Stephen Ryan said 'the most likely event' is that Ney will quit in front of the judge because that would represent acceptance of responsibility for his crimes, a critical issue with regard to the length of his prison term." (AP)

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Unveiling his "buck stops here" rhetoric last week, House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) announced he was going to order up an independent panel to "advise us on the page program," in response to the Foley scandal. Remember?

The morning of the press conference, Ex-FBI chief Louis Freeh had been the rumored head of the panel, and the effort was thought to be an investigation -- but by the time Hastert appeared before reporters, he said only that he was "looking for a person of high caliber" to "advise" on the program.

So whatever happened to that?

In a word, nothing.

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A long-awaited report by the Senate Finance Committee accuses Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform and other Abramoff-linked non-profits with committing acts that are likely in violation of their tax-exempt status.

You can read the full report here. The document is 608 pages in total, but most of that is devoted to appendices and exhibits; the report itself is 55 pages long.

The report hits ATR for a number of activities unrelated to its nonprofit purpose. Like the Senate Indian Affairs Committee Report on Abramoff, the Senate Finance Committee criticized ATR for acting as a lobbying operation, advocating certain positions in exchange for donations from Abramoff clients.

The panel began investigating the use of charities by disgraced superlobbyist Jack Abramoff in spring 2005. A bipartisan effort, the report was released today by the Democrats alone. Committee chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) did not release a statement on the report, nor did he announce hearings. A Grassley staffer told the Washington Post that the senator endorsed the report but said he "did not co-author the report because he had hoped it would have included Democratic groups that he believes also breached their tax status."

The panel found that ATR set up meetings for Abramoff clients with administration officials, such as President Bush and Karl Rove, in exchange for hefty contributions.

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At least three people will tell the House ethics committee that Speaker Hastert knew about Mark Foley's problem with House pages before it became public ten days ago. That testimony contradicts Hastert's public stance so far: that he learned about it from ABC News.

First, Kirk Fordham, Foley's former chief of staff, is expected to tell the House ethics committee today that Hastert's chief of staff Scott Palmer told him he'd spoken to Hastert personally about Foley's problem as early as 2002.

Neither Fordham nor his lawyer have confirmed this crucial detail on the record. But an anonymous source -- who seems to be intimately acquainted with Fordham's side of the story -- told both The Washington Post and Newsweek that this what Fordham remembers -- and that's what he'll tell the ethics committee. (Palmer has vaguely rebuffed Fordham's account of Palmer's 2002 or 2003 intervention with Foley, and one imagines that he will dispute this part of it too.)

Second, Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) says that he talked to Hastert about Foley earlier this spring. "I took it to my supervisor," Reynolds says.

Third is House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) who also remembers talking to Hastert about the matter in the spring.

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I finally had a chance to speak with Orlando do Campo, a public defender representing Jose Padilla, about his allegation that government interrogators forced Padilla to take drugs similar to LSD and PCP.

Do Campo declined to be more specific about the effects Padilla has described that make the lawyer believe his client was given those illegal hallucinogens, or how many times the alleged terrorist says he was drugged. But do Campo said that more information may come out soon -- if the Defense Department complies with an order from the judge hearing the case.

Early this year, do Campo said, Padilla's legal team asked the Defense Department to turn over Padilla's medical records from his detention at the brig of the Naval Weapons Station in Charleston, S.C. The government resisted, but the judge ordered them to comply. Several months later, do Campo still has not seen a single page of those records.

If Padilla was given drugs of any kind, one could expect them to be recorded in those files. Is that why the Defense Department is having a hard time turning those documents over?

Prosecutors have asked that David Safavian get three years in prison for lying to ethics and Senate investigators about his ties to Jack Abramoff.

Safavian, a former Bush administration appointee, was convicted back in June -- the first conviction in the Abramoff investigation. Safavian's lawyer has asked that he serve no prison time, arguing instead for home detention and/or community service. He's due to be sentenced October 27.

ThinkProgress has a great clip of K.A. Paul, the evangelist who says he convinced House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) to resign, doing his thing on MSNBC.

"Look at -- Chicago Sun Times says, 'Hastert Security Breach.' That is ridiculous. If Hastert and President Bush cannot protect their own homes, how could they protect American people?" Paul summed up for the puzzled MSNBC host. "You know a lot of lies are going on, and - Dennis Hastert never said, all he said is, it's a privileged discussion."

Why are Republicans now calling for the investigation of a three year-old incident involving a Clinton-era official that's already been settled? As a senior Democrat points out, their call came just one day after that official, Sandy Berger, criticized the Bush administration's North Korea policy on Fox News.

In 2003, Sandy Berger, the former National Security Advisor to President Clinton, took classified documents from the National Archives*. That's illegal. The Justice Department investigated the matter, and prosecuted Berger on a misdemeanor charge. In April 2005, Berger pleaded guilty to one charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material.

Yesterday -- eighteen months after that case ended -- 10 House Republicans suddenly called for a House investigation of the same incident.

In an attempt to explain the timing, the spokesman for Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA), one of the Republicans calling for the (re-)investigation, said that the House had held off until the Justice Department's probe concluded. Neither Hunter or the other GOPers have criticized the Justice Department's investigation, nor a parallel probe conducted by the National Archives' inspector general.

Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA), the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, joined the movement yesterday, sending a letter to the inspector general of the National Archives asking for a copy of his report on the matter. His spokesman described the move as a preliminary step to investigation.

Davis' ranking member on the panel, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), protested the move. "The Berger incident is not new," Waxman wrote to Davis, "and there is no conceivable standard under which it would be considered a vitally important national security matter." He added with a note of skepticism that Berger had "appeared on Fox television and criticized the Bush Administration for its negligent approach to North Korea" just the day before the calls for investigation came.

The full letter below the jump....

Update: Berger took documents from the National Archives, not the National Security Archives, as this post originally stated.

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Old-fashioned journalists have a term for bizarre, interesting and/or disturbing little articles -- "Hey Mabel" stories, they call them. And the New York Sun's Josh Gerstein had a doozy of a "Hey Mabel" in yesterday's paper.

In a new court filing on behalf of alleged dirty bomber Jose Padilla, his lawyers allege that government interrogators forced him to take LSD, Gerstein reported.

"Additionally, Padilla was given drugs against his will, believed to be some form of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) or phencyclidine (PCP), to act as a sort of truth serum during his interrogations," he quotes the filing.

Now, There are some important details that aren't explained: Padilla's lawyers don't say what effects the prisoner reported to make them conclude it was LSD or PCP, nor do they report how many times such a drug or drugs were administered. And as any self-respecting child of the D.A.R.E era knows, LSD and PCP typically produce wildly different behavior (neither of which is particularly helpful if you're trying to get information out of someone).

Still -- if their charge is accurate, it's disturbing and bizarre. Of course, the U.S. government pioneered research into LSD in particular in the 1950s and 60s. CIA officers even tested the drug by surruptitiously dosing each other, leading at least one acid-tripping spook to run in a paranoid frenzy through Washington D.C. and over a bridge into Virginia, where his co-workers later found him cowering under a fountain.

But through experiences like this, the government concluded the drug was worthless as an interrogation tool, a means to "flip" Communist agents, or anything else their Cold War minds had feverishly dreamed possible. Is it possible that they're experimenting with mind drugs again? That sounds completely outlandish. But when you look at history, and then look at the Padilla filing, it's hard to rule out.

I've called three members of Padilla's legal team multiple times in an attempt to get more details, but have gotten nowhere. Can this be real?

My phone rang yesterday evening, and it was everybody's favorite spiritual adviser to the scum of the earth, Mr. K.A. Paul!

"My people told me that I shouldn't talk to you. I was told after they did research on you you're a small reporter and you did negative things," said Paul, who claims to have spent hours talking with some of the greatest despots of the last two decades. "I said, 'I don't care, I'm going to call him.'"

"I made a commitment to you," said Paul, recalling our earlier conversation. "You want to write bad about me, go ahead. But there is a Judgment Day," he observed, with a note of warning in his voice. "I have to keep my word."

In our conversation, Paul explained that House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) isn't the first Republican to give him a nice chunk of face-time. He said that when they were in power, he had "extensive," "3-hour" sit-downs with GOP heavyweights Tom DeLay, Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich. He also had a two-and-a-half hour meeting with Bob and Elizabeth Dole, he said. Others:

George W. Bush: "I met him on several occasions," Paul told me, including in Des Moines, Iowa, and at Bush's church in Austin, Tex. "I prayed with him," he said. "I appreciated it when in 2000 president Bush got on his knees and prayed with me," recalled Paul. "What I don't appreciate is his 2004 speech, 'I have political capital, and I'm going to spend it.'. . . . If you are humble, sincere and honest, God will bless you," Paul cautioned. "If not, it doesn't matter who you are, you will be defeated."

Condolleezza Rice: Rice "called me on July 24, 2003. . . I asked, 'President Bush, why is he not calling me?' They said, 'No, he's in the room.'" (More details about the conversation, he said, were available in his new book.)

Bill O'Reilly: "I've been on his show a dozen times since 1999," said Paul, who called O'Reilly "my good friend." "[He] says he's fair and balanced, but he's not!"

As for Dennis Hastert, he said he met him first "in a casual way" when he was speaking at "a prayer breakfast dinner" in Washington, D.C. in 1997. He also met him at a Promise Keepers rally in 1997 in Washington, D.C.

Paul said that in the past day he'd received calls from Larry King Live, the CBS Morning News and dozens of other outlets. "I need to spend more time with the media!" he exclaimed, as if chastising himself for forgetting to do so. He didn't mention that shortly after his Tuesday meeting with Hastert, his assistant had sent a barrage of emails to media outlets featuring the original AP story of Paul's visit to Hastert, along with Paul's cell phone number.

Majority Leader Asked to Testify on Foley
"According to sources, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) received an invitation Wednesday to appear before the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, but a specific date was not disclosed.

"A spokesman for Boehner reiterated that he will cooperate fully with the investigation.

"Additionally, Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.) will appear before the ethics committee next week. Adam Terry, a spokesman for Alexander, said he will 'voluntarily' offer testimony Wednesday." (Roll Call) (sub. req.)

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Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV) "collected a $1.1 million windfall on a Las Vegas land sale even though he hadn't personally owned the property for three years," the AP reports.

Except that's wrong. Reid made a $700,000 profit on the sale, not $1.1 million. Also, the story, by the AP’s John Solomon, makes it sound as if Reid got money for land he didn't own. But that's not the case.

It’s not the first time that Solomon has published a misleading story about Reid. This is the third such story by Solomon over the past six months. Each time, Solomon has hit Reid for taking actions which might create the appearance of ethical impropriety. But because Solomon writes for the most powerful news organization in the land, these very gray-shaded stories pack a wallop. It doesn’t help that on numerous occasions, he has missed or distorted key details – missteps that help blow up his stories.

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I spoke -- briefly -- with a man who says he is the Rev. K.A. Paul, "spiritual adviser to the scum of the Earth," who had a remarkable 40-minute prayer-and-discussion meeting yesterday with House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL).

I reached the man by calling a cellular telephone number provided by an anonymous tipster.

"He never said that," Paul told me when I asked his reaction to the claim, apparently from Hastert's office, that the embattled GOP leader had been "duped" into meeting with Paul.

I pointed out that it had been reported this morning in the Chicago Sun-Times. "I don't dupe anybody," he said. "That's ridiculous." Hastert was "gracious," Paul said. "He welcomed me, he hosted me."

"That's why I think a lot of people don't talk to the media," he opined.

Paul said he'd met Hastert before, but not "in an extended way," like the meeting yesterday. But he's met with former House majority leader Tom DeLay "many times," including dinner with The Hammer at his Texas home in early 2001, Paul told me.

Paul, whose ministry includes counseling world leaders in trouble -- particularly despots, murderers and troublemakers -- begged off the phone, but promised to call back later for a longer chat.

"Never" is a dangerous word for a Republican congressman when talking about Jack Abramoff.

Just ask Rep. Richard Pombo (R-CA), whose tight race may have gotten tighter over claims he'd "never" been worked by the disgraced superlobbyist.

"He never once lobbied me on anything," Pombo had said of Abramoff, practically inviting journalists to prove him wrong. "He never asked me to sign a letter, vote for or against a bill, introduce a bill, never once stepped foot in my office."

Sure enough, the AP combed through stacks of Abramoff's billing records for his client, the Northern Mariana Islands, and what did they discover: "more than two dozen. . . occasions from 1996 through 2001" where Abramoff's associates contacted Pombo's staff. And two direct contacts between Abramoff and Pombo, according to the service's report yesterday.

Just combing through our stack here, I can see an Abramoff associate billing the Marianas for... asking Pombo to sign a letter:

Investigative mag Mother Jones scores a lengthy chat with questionable evangelist and Dennis Hastert confidante K.A. Paul, winning new details of his meeting yesterday with the embattled speaker of the House.

It turns out Paul's meeting was for 7 a.m., but he showed up a half-hour late, says MoJo:

The two men withdrew into a private room where, Paul says, he launched into a sermon about what Hastert should do. Paul told Mother Jones that he cited politicians whose reputations suffered when they resisted stepping down: Donald Rumsfeld, Tom DeLay, Bill Clinton. “I said ‘If you don’t do that, the Republicans will lose control of the Congress, you will no longer be Speaker in 30 days, and at the same time they will all blame you because of Foley scandal. You want that for you? You want that to be your life legacy after accomplish so many good things?’ So that’s what convinced him.”

“God gave me this position that I don’t deserve,” Paul says Hastert told him. “For the good of the people, I will do it.”

The Chicago Sun-Times today reported Hastert was "duped" into meeting with Paul. Hastert's office maintains he is not stepping down.

Bonus: Paul tells MoJo he knew al-Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi “when he was nobody.” Dubbed the "spiritual adviser to the scum of the Earth," Paul says he has counseled such men as Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Khaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Liberia's Charles Taylor, and former House majority leader Tom DeLay.

Rep. Stephanie Herseth (D-SD) recently became the latest figure to call on House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) to step down over his mishandling of the Foley page scandal. That gave us a reason to update our list of folks demanding Hastert's ouster.

The list has grown, thanks to Herseth, editorials in the Los Angeles Times and the New Hampshire Union Leader, and a host of others. Check it out. If we missed a call, let us know!

Disgraced former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) paid a visit to the House page dormitory in 2000, according to ABC News. A drunken visit to the dorm by Foley in 2002 or 2003 had been reported last week. Writes ABC's Rhonda Schwartz:

A staff supervisor at the dorm for congressional pages intervened when former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) tried to pay the teens a nighttime visit in the summer of 2000, ABC News has learned.

The pages were having an informal "mixer" party in their dorm at the Tip O'Neil building behind the Capitol, according to a former page who was 17 at the time.

"It was a beautiful summer evening, and I recall Mr. Foley arriving in his blue Series 3 BMW convertible about 9:30 at night," the former page said. "Several of us saw him and went outside to chat."

A supervisor saw the kids going towards Foley's car and "shooed" them back inside, Schwartz reports.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert was "duped" into meeting with an eccentric globetrotting evangelist and his associate, according to today's Chicago Sun-Times.

According to the paper's account, a "massive coincidence" is how the evangelist, K.A. Paul, finagled a meeting with Hastert, who's currently facing one of the biggest crises of his career, that also threatens the power of the GOP.

An associate of Paul's says he just happened to be driving through Plano, Ill., on Monday night, near Hastert's home. At a restaurant there he encountered Hastert and his security contingent. The associate, Dennis Ryan, approached Hastert and called Rev. Paul.

"Hastert talked to Paul and apparently decided to make the Tuesday date with him without consulting his advisors," the paper concludes.

The next morning at 7:30, Paul arrived at Hastert's house with an AP reporter in tow and associate Ryan, who had by now armed himself with a camera.

The paper does not explain why Hastert chose to meet with Paul, how the "reverend" evaded traditional security checks, or why Hastert isn't going on record about any of this.

Rep. Charles Taylor (R-NC) has a remarkable talent for steering federal dollars to benefit properties that he owns, The Wall Street Journal reports this morning.

As you read about the millions that Taylor has earmarked for himself ($11.4 million to widen a highway that runs through a resort town where his development companies own thousands of acres, $3.8 million for a park that is "directly in front of the Blue Ridge Savings Bank, flagship of his financial empire"), recall Taylor's dogged opposition to federal money going to a 9/11 memorial. As chairman of the House Interior Appropriations subcommittee, Taylor was for years the sole impediment to releasing the $10 million in federal funds needed to buy the land for a memorial in Shanksville, Pa., where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed.

Taylor's opposition to the effort, The Washington Post explained at the time, "comes down to principle: The federal government is already the largest landowner in the country, and he believes that no additional tax dollars should go to more land buying for this or any other memorial."

When challenged on his earmarks by the Journal, Taylor sounds a different principle:

"The same tax dollars would be spent," [Taylor] said through a spokesman. "The decisions about where and how much would just be left to unelected bureaucrats."

God forbid they'd spend the money on something meaningful to taxpayers, instead of beautifying the view out his bank's front window.

We don't even get to write our own punch lines now. This latest from Central Florida News 13:

If you navigate to U.S. Senate Candidate Katherine Harris' website, you will notice the top headline/press release reads, "Harris Beats Nelson -- Leads 54%-45%.

However, it's not until clicking on the link that you're informed the results came from a straw poll taken at the Lakeland Bi-Annual Politics in the Park.

In the rest of Florida, she's trailing incumbent Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) by over 30 points.

Update: The "straw poll" was worse than I thought. Apparently, you had to pay $25 to vote in it. And that even goes for the 6-year-olds. Also, Harris trails by slightly less than 30 points, not "over 30 points," as I wrote earlier.

Sources Deny "October Surprise" Theory
"Two of the news media's sources of Mark Foley's sexually explicit instant messages to former House pages said this week that they came forward to expose the Florida congressman's actions, not to help the Democrats in the midterm elections....

"One of ABC News's sources, a former page, said he went public with his knowledge of the instant messages on Sept. 29 only after the network, the day before, published the questionable e-mails that Foley had sent to the Louisiana boy. The former page and current college student stressed that he is a 'staunch Republican' who 'wouldn't vote for a Democrat ever.' He also said that he is not calling for the resignation of Hastert or any other Republican leader....

"'I decided that it was in the best interests of kids in general, pages and my friends specifically that Foley be dealt with quickly and swiftly so that he couldn't hurt anyone else,' the Republican student wrote in his e-mail. 'We've seen how long the Justice department and every other government bureaucracy can take to deal with criminal issues and abuse. I knew the media would be the fastest way to get Foley the justice he deserved.'" (WaPo)

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Yet another federal investigation. From USA Today:

The FBI is investigating whether a member of Sen. Arlen Specter's staff broke the law by helping her husband, a lobbyist, secure almost $50 million in Pentagon spending for his clients, the senator acknowledged Tuesday....

The federal probe stems from a February report by USA TODAY about Siegel. Specter helped direct $48.7 million in Pentagon spending over the past five years to clients of her lobbyist husband, Michael Herson.

Specter has acknowledged he used his position on the Senate Appropriations Committee to put special-interest language in Pentagon spending bills directing the money to clients of Herson's firm, American Defense International.

Specter says he didn't know of the link to Siegel, who was one of his top advisers on spending issues until last fall.

This morning, Roll Call reported that the FBI reviewed Specter's financial disclosure records this past April.

From a 2004 article (sub. req.) in The New Republic on Dr. K.A. Paul, House Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-IL) go-to guy for last minute soul-searching:

Over the past two decades, Kilari Anand Paul, a self-described "Hindu-born follower of Jesus," has cultivated a peculiar specialty as spiritual adviser to the scum of the earth. Liberia's Charles Taylor, Yugoslavia's Slobodan Milosevic, and Iraq's Saddam Hussein are among the more infamous butchers to talk with Paul about the moral implications of running a brutal, repressive, and occasionally genocidal regime. In fact, Dr. Paul, as everyone calls him (thanks to an honorary degree from Living Word Bible College in Swan River, Manitoba), has counseled scores of corrupt political leaders at all levels of government, as well as warlords, rebels, and terrorists from Mumbai to Manila to Mogadishu. By Paul's estimate, he has gone mano a mano with the leaders of every significant terrorist and rebel group in the 89 countries where his ministry operates.

From yesterday's -- yesterday's -- Cleveland Plain Dealer:

Voters should oust congressional Republican leaders because U.S. foreign policy is delaying the second coming of Jesus Christ, according to a evangelical preacher trying to influence closely contested political races.

K.A. Paul railed against the war in Iraq on Sunday before a crowd of 1,000 at the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland Heights, his first stop on what he hopes is a 30-city campaign.

"[J]ust over 5 feet tall. . . [a] charismatic man in a beige three-piece suit trimmed with sparkles," is how the paper described Paul, who today met with embattled House Speaker Dennis Hastert for 30 minutes.

The paper also noted that The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a group which monitors charitable and religious groups, has "cut ties" with Paul's organization, the Global Peace Initiative, after it "failed to provide information about its board of directors and the use of its resources."

It's a transparency extravaganza! Three new databases just went live that provide some excellent tools for muckrakers.

Over at OMBWatch, they've just launched FedSpending.org, a searchable database of federal grants and contracts. It's similar to the website recently mandated by the Coburn-Obama law, though that website will only be available in 2008. Curious what contracts add up to Lockheed Martin's $24,779,249,050 this year? You can find out there.

At the Center for Responsive Politics, you can get a rundown of the net worth of every member of Congress and the administration, as well as breakdowns from their financial disclosure statements.

The group also launched a new travel database, where you see the sponsored trips taken by each member of Congress in the past two years.

All databases were funded by grants from the Washington-based nonprofit the Sunlight Foundation. Happy raking!

You're House Speaker Dennis Hastert. You're up to your wattle in the recriminations and repercussions of the Foley page scandal. You probably lost whatever chance you had of keeping your party in the majority. You're trying to save your own skin, much less the skins of your loyal staff, while multiple investigations are digging into your side about who knew what, when, and what they did or didn't do about it.

So you decide to take a meeting with a globe-hopping, PR-happy evangelist who (if accounts can be believed) faked his own leper colony?

After the 30-minute meeting between Hastert and Indian-by-way-of-Houston Christian evangelist K.A. Paul today, Hastert had no comment for the press. Paul, however, was downright chatty.

"I am humbled with his humility and simplicity," Paul told the Associated Press. (In the past, Paul has relied on the work of public relations firm Rubenstein Associates, who has also handled Rupert Murdoch and David Letterman. The firm says it no longer represents him.)

Paul was trying to get Hastert to step down, he told AP. "We don't want the Foley scandal when we have 100 more important things to do."

Perhaps that's true. But why did Hastert give a guy like Paul half an hour of face time to hear what plenty of other people have been more than happy to tell him?

According to a June 2006 article from the Houston Press, Paul has plenty of history to be wary of, including:

- claiming another minister's leper colony as his own, and videotaping said lepers for a promotional video

- transporting children in an airplane one former crew member called a "flying death trap"

- leaving a trail of unpaid bills for the plane's fuel and maintenance

- interfering with a murder investigation in India, earning the wrath of that country's National Council of Churches

- fleeing to the United States from India after nine of his American volunteers were arrested and thrown in prison

- abandoning an 11-year-old girl after checking her into a hospital

But he also appears to have strange connections -- and a good deal of money. Anybody know more about the guy, or why Hastert might agree to meet with him?

Former House clerk Jeff Trandahl has a lot to say, but not to the public.

The entirety of Trandahl's anticipated statement on the Foley case, courtesy of his lawyer Cono Namorato:

"Jeff Trandahl will cooperate fully with the FBI and the House ethics committee investigations. At this time, Mr. Trandahl will not be airing his recollections with the media."

Thank you very much sir, Mr. Namorato.

The San Diego Union-Tribune published excerpts from a fiery letter it received from Duke Cunningham, the felonious ex-congressman the paper helped put in jail.

But, as clever Reader DH found, the paper secretly published the entire letter, hiding it in a PDF on its site.

You can read the four-page letter here. It's clearly a response to Marcus Stern, the U-T reporter who broke the Duke scandal and now appears to be working on a book about the saga. "You write you book," Cunningham wrote in a barely-legible scrawl, "and remember what forge [sic] got from [Mitchell] Wade [one of Duke's main bribers] they you printed" he continued writing, "as truth will come out and you will find out how liablist [sic] you have & will be," he finished.

Although he wrote early in the letter that he could not discuss his case, Duke dropped some tantalizing tidbits later on.

"Ask yourself why I kicked [Wade] off his own boat twice, told him I was not going to stay on his boat and put it up for sale," Duke wrote. That appears to be a reference to the Duke-Stir, a boat which Wade bought and later gave to Cunningham.

He also appears to disclose classified information. "There is a secret paper in my file that the U.S. Airforce presented to me (both former Chiefs of USAF) to increase the MZM programs and the justification for doing so," Duke wrote.

"It was funded at less than wanted & it will today save lives in the best Aviation Humit [sic] Program in existence now ever deployed with our training forces."

Here's the entire letter. Note: he doesn't say anything about hookers.

CNN reports: "Jeff Trandahl, the former House clerk who oversaw the House Page Program, is expected to break his silence Tuesday on the Foley page scandal, according to a colleague familiar with the media's interest in the case."

Trandahl, who's absolutely central to the Foley scandal, has been ducking media questions for about ten days now.

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) released a statement giving his "best recollection" of the Foley incident back in 2000, that's at odds with key details of an earlier statement given by his own press secretary.

For starters, Kolbe spokeswoman Korenna Kline told The Washington Post that the congressman had personally confronted Foley about his inappropriate exchanges. Kolbe now says he merely "recommended" that the page's complaint "be passed along to Rep. Foley's office and the Clerk who supervised the Page program." (Kolbe's full statement is after the jump.)

Kline also told the WaPo that the page had showed the offending messages to Kolbe. In his statement, Kolbe denies ever seeing the messages. (A source told the WaPo that the messages, which have not been released, were "sexually explicit.")

The congressman gave no explanation for why his version of events contradicts that of his spokeswoman. Kolbe also implies now that this really wasn't his problem, since "the young man was no longer a Page and not subject to the jurisdiction of the program.”

Read more »

At a press conference this morning, Hastert began to qualify his defense of how his office handled Mark Foley's indiscretions, as new details have emerged that cast his earlier versions of events in doubt.

"I don’t think anybody in my office at any time did anything wrong," Hastert said -- hardly a ringing endorsement. However, “if anybody is found to have hidden information or covered up information, they really should be gone,” he told reporters. Hastert did not indicate he was undertaking any particular effort on his part to find out who on his staff misled him.

As we noted yesterday, Hastert's chief of staff knew about Foley's problem back in 2003, according to two congressional staffers -- one of them Foley's former chief of staff.

Asked about Rep. Jim Kolbe's (R-AZ) recent revelation that he'd confronted Foley over suggestive messages sent to a former page, Hastert implied -- but did not explicitly state -- that Kolbe had never brought the problem to the Speaker's office. "If it was something that was of a nature that should have been reported or brought forward, then he should have done that," he said.

Update: Here's the AP's write-up.

The Foley scandal has caused a rash of scheduling conflicts, it appears. The two figures most tainted by the scandal, Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) and NRCC Chairman Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), had been scheduled to come campaign for Rep. Don Sherwood (R-PA), who's been having a tough campaign this year, in part because he allegedly tried to strangle his ex-mistress (he's admitted the affair, denied the strangling).

Things just didn't work out. But it has nothing to do with Foley. Not for Hastert:

Jake O'Donnell, a spokesman for Sherwood, said Monday that an Oct. 18 event with Hastert was only tentatively scheduled and was canceled mostly because Sherwood had another major event the next day.

And not for Reynolds:

"When asked why the Reynolds appearance was canceled, [O'Donnell] said, 'It is mostly about the travel schedule, but there is that other issue.'

Wait. "That other issue?" Now I'm confused. Reynolds' spokesman clears things up:

NRCC spokesman Ed Patru said Reynolds had events in his own district that led him to drop out of the Sherwood fundraiser.

"Mr. O'Donnell is not in a position to know why the event was canceled," Patru said. "He was clearly out of the loop on this one."

So there. Nothing to do with Foley.

Ex-Page Aired Concerns About Foley to Congressman in 2000
"A former Congressional page approached Representative Jim Kolbe, Republican of Arizona, as long as six years ago to report feeling uncomfortable by messages sent from Representative Mark Foley [as was reported yesterday in The Washington Post], but a spokeswoman for Mr. Kolbe said Monday that it was unclear if Mr. Kolbe had forwarded the complaint to House leaders.

"Mr. Kolbe, a former member of the board that oversees the House page program, remembers talking to a page with concerns about Mr. Foley’s conduct, said Korenna Cline, Mr. Kolbe’s press secretary. But Mr. Kolbe could not remember whether he confronted Mr. Foley directly, Ms. Cline said, or delegated the matter to his staff.

"Reached by telephone on Monday while he was traveling in Europe, Mr. Kolbe declined to answer questions about the page’s complaint or Mr. Foley’s case. In a brief conversation, he said: 'We’ll have a statement on that. We’ll have a statement on that.'" (NY Times)

Read more »

Denny Hastert and others in the Republican leadership say that they never heard a thing about Mark Foley's indiscretions with House pages before the fall of 2005. That's their story and they're sticking to it.

But a trickle of stories over the past few days have made that account even harder to believe. Since all the details can get confusing, below is a narrative of warnings and interventions before the leadership says it knew about Foley's problem.

As early as 1997, Foley began sending sexually explicit messages to a page; other pages have come forward from the 1998, 2000, and 2002 classes saying that they also received explicit messages.

The first reported intervention with Foley came in 2000 from Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), who had a private meeting with him after a page alerted Kolbe that Foley had sent him inappropriate messages. A source, who had copies of the offending instant messages and showed them to The Washington Post, said they were "sexually explicit"; Kolbe's office denied that and said the messages only made the page "uncomfortable."

Kolbe's spokeswoman told the Post that she "could not yet determine" whether Kolbe had notified anyone else (i.e. the Republican leadership) about Foley's problem.

As early as 2001, the Clerk of the House, Jeff Trandahl, notified Kirk Fordham, Foley's former chief of staff, that Foley's behavior with the pages was a problem. Over the course of the next couple years, Trandahl notified Fordham "several times," that Foley had a problem.

Read more »

The Jack Abramoff scandal will be with us for at least a year to come, perhaps longer. Just two weeks ago, the House Government Reform Committee issued a blockbuster report revealing hundreds of contacts between Abramoff's team and the White House that resulted in the resignation last Friday of Karl Rove's assistant Susan Ralston.

The trail doesn't stop there, of course. So we sat down with National Journal's Peter Stone, the author of the forthcoming book Heist: Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies, And the Buying of Washington, who told us about how Abramoff operated, how the investigation is progressing, and what to expect next.

Read more »

Should Denny Hastert resign or not? Here's one conservative's view on the matter, courtesy of Robert Novak's column today:

"It's really moot," one of Hastert's most severe Republican critics (who would not be identified) told me. "We are sure to lose the House, and Denny never would want to be minority leader." With Hastert's last performance as speaker coming in a predictably do-nothing lame-duck session after the Nov. 7 election, the month of October will be challenging for him and his party as he decides what to do with plans to campaign for challenged House candidates.

Via The Stakeholder.

Ethics Committee Starts Interviews in Foley Inquiry
"Moving with unusual speed, the House Ethics Committee began interviews in its probe of the Mark Foley scandal, an investigation that will test both the Republican leadership and the panel itself.

"The inquiry will involve questioning of top House Republicans, including Speaker Dennis Hastert, and senior aides with decades of experience on Capitol Hill and their own relations with party leaders as well as members of the ethics panel." (WSJ)

Read more »

And Foleygate storms into week three.

From The Washington Post:

A Republican congressman knew of disgraced former representative Mark Foley's inappropriate Internet exchanges as far back as 2000 and personally confronted Foley about his communications.

A spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) confirmed yesterday that a former page showed the congressman Internet messages that had made the youth feel uncomfortable with the direction Foley (R-Fla.) was taking their e-mail relationship...

The revelation pushes back by at least five years the date when a member of Congress has acknowledged learning of Foley's behavior with former pages....

A source with direct knowledge of Kolbe's involvement said the messages shared with Kolbe were sexually explicit, and he read the contents to The Washington Post under the condition that they not be reprinted. But Cline denied the source's characterization, saying only that the messages had made the former page feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, she said, "corrective action" was taken. Cline said she has not yet determined whether that action went beyond Kolbe's confrontation with Foley.

From Louisville, Ky.'s WHAS-11 News. The story's dated last Thursday, but I don't think we've mentioned this one yet:

According to Congressman Ron Lewis, the former page is now a soldier in Iraq. But five years ago, he was a teenage page in the U.S. House who was the subject of some kind of questionable contact from Congressman Mark Foley.

Lewis’s chief of staff got a satellite phone call from Iraq Tuesday afternoon from a man who wouldn't identify himself. But he did say he was a soldier from Kentucky’s Second Congressional District who wanted to give Lewis a heads up.

“To let us know that he had been approached by Mark Foley in 2001 and that he is speaking to the proper authorities, to a JAG officer who will then pass that on to the FBI,” says Lewis.

Congressman Lewis’s office is the only local one we've found that's gotten a call from any of their former pages, alleging misconduct by Foley, a man Lewis describes this way: “He was a creepy guy.”

According to the story, Lewis' office got the call from the former page on Oct. 2. The next day, the congressman cancelled his Oct. 10 fundraiser with House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL).

Follow-ups to this story have noted that the FBI has since spoken with the ex-page who contacted Lewis.

Lewis hasn't yet called for Hastert's ouster, but WHAS says he's pointedly not ruling out the possibility he might do so in the future.

In a long, detailed piece on the Foley scandal, Newsweek gives the most detailed account yet of Kirk Fordham's early warning to Speaker Hastert's chief of staff about Foley's interest in the House pages.

According to Newsweek, Fordham, then Foley's chief of staff, approached Scott Palmer after Foley's now-infamous drunken visit to the House page dorm. But most significantly, Fordham says that after the meeting, Palmer told him that he'd "informed the Speaker" about the problem -- and this was "sometime in 2002 or 2003."

From Newsweek:

As early as in 2001, Fordham had received disturbing reports of Foley's "inappropriate" behavior toward the congressional pages. According to a knowledgeable source familiar with Fordham's account, who did not wish to be identified discussing such a sensitive matter, Fordham is prepared to tell investigators that he was warned "on two or three occasions" about Foley's "overly friendly" socializing with young male pages.

He was informed by Jeff Trandahl, then the Clerk of the House, who oversees the page program. On one occasion, sometime in 2002 or 2003, Trandahl told Fordham about Foley's nocturnal adventure to the pages' dorm. Trandahl told Fordham that Foley "appeared intoxicated," according to the source who provided Fordham's account to NEWSWEEK.

This incident prompted Fordham to go to Scott Palmer, Hastert's chief of staff, and tell him about Foley's behavior. Fordham called Palmer and told him that he wanted to speak with him privately, the source says. The two men met in a small office on Capitol Hill. (Palmer says the meeting never took place.)

Fordham did not tell Palmer about Foley's attempt to enter the pages' dormitory, but rather that he was generally concerned about his boss's excessive friendliness to the pages, according to the source. Palmer expressed surprise and concern, the source says, and wondered what this could mean to Foley's political future. Why would he endanger his career with such conduct?

Palmer assured Fordham that he would talk to Foley. A day or two later, Fordham called Palmer to ask what happened. Palmer told him that he "dealt with it" by talking to Foley and that he "informed the Speaker," according to the source familiar with Fordham's account. Months later Fordham had an awkward conversation with Foley in which his boss indicated that he had spoken to Palmer.

Your Sunday morning Foley scandal roundup:

The Washington Post takes a fine-toothed comb to the different versions of the Foley scandal, as told by GOP leaders. Unsurprising to TPM readers, it snags various inconsistencies:

Gaps and inconsistencies in the public accounts include such basic matters as when House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and his top aides first learned of concerns about Foley's relationships with male pages, and what they did about it. Also unclear is which GOP officials decided that only two members of the six-person House Page Board should confront the Florida lawmaker.

And accounts differ on whether the two board members knew the exact contents of e-mails Foley sent last year to a teenage boy in Louisiana.

Meanwhile, the LATimes takes a closer look at the "fixers" on House Speaker Dennis Hastert's (R-IL) staff who were supposed to take care of the Foley problem before it erupted. The "trusted lieutenants" now embroiled in the mess are compared to Richard Nixon's win-at-all-costs sycophants who squashed political problems for the impeached president:

Today, what this trio of senior aides knew about Foley's interest in teenage pages and what they did about it may determine whether the story remains a sexual scandal or grows into one of broader deception and coverup, as Hastert's critics have charged.

Fiercely loyal to the speaker and the Republican Party, veteran aides Scott Palmer, Mike Stokke and Ted Van Der Meid have for years helped Hastert tend to his Republican flock — and protect its members when they run into trouble.

According to several current and former congressional staffers, the group played a central role in the effort to rewrite House rules so then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay could retain his leadership post even if he were indicted. The team also helped engineer the elimination of a congressional subcommittee critical of the cost of a construction project favored by Hastert and others.

Finally, several papers, including the LATimes and the Chicago Tribune, are raising serious questions about whether the House ethics committee is up to the task of investigating the scandal -- since it's done so poorly in the past, and is already showing signs of partisan influence. The Trib uncovers this nugget:

[S]ome Democrats complained Friday about a "strategy session" conference call that [investigative panel member Rep. Judy] Biggert [(R-IL)]reportedly participated in early in the week with other House Republicans about how to deal with the political fallout from the Foley case.

But Biggert said the Monday conference call took place before she knew she'd be part of the subcommittee named to look into the issue, and she also said the call was informational and not political in nature. Biggert, a lawyer, said she can perform her duties like an "officer of the court," without regard for who has given her political support.

Biggert, of course, was a member of the ethics panel at the time of the call, even though she had not yet been named to the investigative subcommittee.

Further evidence of trouble: the comments of investigative panel chair Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), that Hastert has done an "excellent job" handling the Foley mess. Also, Hastert has given nearly $50,000 to GOP members of the ethics panel in the last several years. What, we worry?

A former House page tells the LATimes that after several years of contact, he and Mark Foley had sex:

A former House page says he had sex with then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) after receiving explicit e-mails in which the congressman described assessing the sexual orientation and physical attributes of underage pages but waiting until later to make direct advances.

The former page, who agreed to discuss his relationship with Foley with the Los Angeles Times on the condition that he not be identified, said his electronic correspondence with Foley began after he finished the respected Capitol Hill page program for high school juniors. His sexual encounter was in the fall of 2000, he said. At the time, he was 21 and a graduate of a rural Northeastern college. . . .

[T]he former page's exchanges with Foley offer a glimpse of possible predatory behavior by the congressman as he assessed male teenagers assigned as House errand-runners. . . .

Foley's flirtations made the young man feel important at a time when he was struggling with his emerging sexuality. "It seemed cool that he was taking an interest," he said. "I knew he was gay, and he was attracted to me."