More voices rise to join the chorus denouncing the House ethics committee's report exonerating GOP leaders for their blind-eye behavior to former Rep. Mark Foley's page seduction:

Houston Chronicle - "Critics for years have described the bipartisan U.S. House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct as a joke. [The Foley report] removed all doubt about the House's inability to discipline itself."

U.S. News & World Report - "The bipartisan report on the Mark Foley scandal was a study in pitiful cowardice." (Opinion)

Orlando Sentinel - "If willful ignorance among members and staff to Mr. Foley's exploits and reckless endangerment of teenage pages doesn't break any rule or call for any penalty, the committee's standards aren't low. They're subterranean. . . . The long-awaited report on the Foley scandal was an acid test as to whether the House ethics committee -- evenly split between Republicans and Democrats -- was finally ready to wake up to its responsibilities after years of slumber. The committee flunked."

"A 16-year-old kid was entrusted by his parents to the U.S. House of Representatives, and Congress has a responsibility," Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told the Chicago Tribune in October.

"The most important questions are, 'What did the Republican leadership know, when did they know it and, if they knew something, why didn't they do anything to protect the child?'"

Now, Emanuel's questions are boomeranging back on him and his Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. A House report revealed last week that he and the DCCC knew of Foley's emails during the 2005 period but did not bring them up with the House Page Board or other groups.

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The reviews are in on the House ethics committee report on the Foley scandal, and they aren't good.

"[A] 91-page exercise in cowardice," a New York Times editorial thundered."The report’s authors were clearly more concerned about protecting the members of the House than the young men and women under their charge in the page program."

"What, one has to wonder, would it take for the House ethics committee to hold a lawmaker or a staff member accountable?" asked the Washington Post in its editorial, "The Buck Just Stopped." (The Wall Street Journal, however, pronounced the report "fair and sensible.")

Even some GOPers are whispering that those who dodged a bullet only did so because the committee purposely fired above their heads. Roll Call's John Bresnahan quoted one unnamed "Republican insider" with ties to Hastert who called the report a "shrewd political document" that carefully criticized only members and staff who were leaving power.

"They kicked people who don't care anymore," the source told Bresnahan. "Hastert doesn't care, and the other guys don't care either. . . . This doesn't hurt them at all."

Yesterday, Paul was among the first to note how the House ethics investigators took outgoing Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ) to task for his less-than-heroic response to complaints from a recently-departed page that Foley was asking him questions about his penis size.

In a statement late yesterday, Kolbe responded. "The report demonstrates that members of my office and I took prompt action in 2001 to address the complaint that was brought to our attention," Kolbe declares. Full statement after the jump.

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One puzzle that had never quite been clear: how did Mark Foley's emails to a former House page reach the public eye?

According to the ethics report (page 44 and on), in the fall of 2005, a page nominated by Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA) received the now-infamous icky emails. He forwarded them to Danielle Savoy, a staffer in Alexander's office, calling them "sick."

From there, Savoy forwarded them to her friend, Kelley Halliwell, a lobbyist and formerly of Rep. Joel Hefley's (R-CO) office. And she forwarded the emails to her boyfriend Justin Field, who worked at the House Democratic Caucus. From there, they went to the House Democratic Caucus communications director Matt Miller. And from him to The Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times (both of whom ultimately decided not to run stories) and also the communications director at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. Nevertheless, it would be nearly 10 months before a publication actually ran with the story.

It sounds from the report that Ted Van Der Meid, Speaker Dennis Hastert's counsel, had his own problems with being too close with the House pages. From pages 39-40:

According to [House Clerk Jeff Trandahl], he raised his concerns about Rep. Foley to Van Der Meid "pretty often" in the context of raising similar concerns he had relative to Van Der Meid's over-involvement with pages assigned to the Speaker's office. Trandahl testified, "So here is my point of contact in the Speaker (sic), and I'm trying to have the conversation about him specifically, but also in a general sense." According to Trandahl, while Van Der Meid understood his concerns "politically," Van Der Meid's "pushback" was that "there is nothing wrong with people being mentors and caring about the kids." Trandahl responded that the page program had paid professionals to serve those functions. Trandahl felt that "there needed to be a very clear line between the page program and people who worked up here [in leadership]."

Van Der Meid did not report Trandahl's concerns about Rep. Foley's conduct to anyone else in the Speaker's Office... He explained that he did not elevate the Foley matter because he "got the impression that [Trandahl] was dealing with it."... He further testified that "[Trandahl] had never asked me to take any other action," and in any event, "I don't know what I would have done."

Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe (R) isn't the only guy to take a beating in the House Ethics Committee report on the Foley scandal.

The panel finds that Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) all but abandoned his responsibilities as chairman of the House Page Board. "Rep. Shimkus should have demanded copies of all relevant e-mails or other documents," the report states. "[A]t a minimum Rep. Shimkus had an obligation to learn more facts regarding the e-mails [between Foley and a page] before concluding that he could handle the matter himself without informing the other members of the Page Board or seeking their input."

They also pull up just short of accusing House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) of conspiring to obstruct justice, when he tried to rope other GOPers with conflicting stories into meeting with him to "prepare a statement." To the panel, that smacked of an attempt to coordinate a plausible lie:

[T]he efforts by the Speaker's office to prepare a statement under the direction of counsel could have had the additional effect of inhibiting the Investigative Subcommittee's ability to secure evidence. . . This effect was compounded by the appearance of [lawyer Randy] Evans and a law partner as counsel for the Speaker, Stokke and Kennedy during their testimony before the Subcommittee.

Some may recall that Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY) refused to attend the meeting. But that doesn't keep him clear of suspicion. He only did that on advice of his counsel -- the aforementioned Randy Evans, who had the thankless (though likely profitable) job of keeping all the men out of trouble.

As we tear through the new House ethics report, we'll bring you updates of the juicy stuff we find.

First up, Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), who comes out looking very, very bad.

A former House page told the committee that he sent Kolbe, to his personal email account, a copy of an instant message he received from Foley in 2001 in which Foley had "made reference to the page's penis size."

When the committee asked Kolbe about this, he said he couldn't recall whether the page had contacted him or his assistant or whether it was by phone or email. What's more, he said he never knew the specifics of the young man's allegation against Foley, and "did not attempt to speculate."

As if that isn't bad enough, Kolbe appears to have tried to keep the kid quiet when the scandal broke: the former page also told the committee that he'd called Kolbe after the Foley story broke this September and asked for advice. He says Kolbe replied that "it is best that you don't even bring this up with anybody.... There is no good that can come from it if you actually talk about this. The man has resigned anyway."

Kolbe's side of the story? He told the committee that "the page had already decided that he was not going to report the IM, and the he merely responded, 'That's your decision.'"

But The Washington Post caught wind of the page's story anyway. And soon after being contacted by a Post reporter about it, Kolbe called the page and left a message: "It looks like you did some talking."

We've posted the relevant section of the report here.

From the AP:

The House ethics committee has concluded that Republican leaders did not break any rules in handling ex-Rep. Mark Foley's improper advances to former male pages but were negligent in protecting the teenagers, a congressional aide said Friday.

Update: More, from Roll Call:

The executive summary of the panel’s report does, however, state: “In all a pattern of conduct was exhibited among many individuals to remain willfully ignorant of the potential consequences of former Rep. Foley’s conduct with respect to House pages.”

Update: You can download the report from the Ethics Committee Web site.

At 2:00 PM, to discuss their report on the Mark Foley investigation.

The AP reads the tea leaves:

The House ethics committee met in closed session Friday, indicating the panel could be close to finishing its report on ex-Rep. Mark Foley's improper advances toward former male pages.

It's the last day of the 109th Congress, which means that if the GOP-controlled House is going to release its ethics report on the Foley scandal, they have to do it today. So keep an eye out.

Signs are tiny, but promising: senior aides whispered to Roll Call earlier this week that the report "could" be publicly released this week. And ethics committee members murmured to the AP that they don't want to deal with this next year.

Still, no one's quite sure whether the committee will be delivering their long anticipated report.

The committee could, as the final act of the most inept board of overseers of the famously inept 109th Congress, simply pass the chore on to the new, Democrat-led ethics committee in January. That would undoubtedly delay the process even further, since the committee will be shifting membership along with the new Congress.

Finally, Vanity Fair has delivered their take-out on the Mark Foley scandal (or Pagegate, if you prefer). And it's chock full of satisfyingly sordid details.

One figure in particular gets a drubbing: the out-going House Speaker, Dennis Hastert.

Here's Hastert, standing dumbly by when Kirk Fordham, Foley's former chief of staff and then Rep. Tom Reynolds' (R-NY) chief of staff, brings word of the coming calamity -- that ABC News has copies of sexually explicit instant messages sent by Foley to underage pages:

Fordham thought he made it clear that his old boss needed to quit, but Foley couldn't bring himself to do that. The N.R.C.C. headquarters was around the corner, and Fordham made it his next stop. There he found Representative Reynolds and Speaker Hastert. But before he could finish relaying the awful news, Reynolds's face got purple and he began to shout, "He needs to resign, and he needs to do it right now!" The Speaker just sat there, silent, according to Fordham: "He didn't react at all. This was weeks before the election, and they're thinking how this is going to impact us."

And here's Hastert trying to attempt damage control:

Hastert, believing the leadership needed to present a united front, as one by one his colleagues were repudiating his foggy recollections, called a Republican-leadership meeting. That same day, an ethics-committee investigation was pressed for by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (over the objections of those who wanted an independent counsel), its purpose to discover who knew what when about Foley. Blunt, Boehner, and Reynolds were all summoned "to basically get their stories straight for the press," according to a knowledgeable source, who adds, "That to me is where Hastert attempted a cover-up."

Reynolds balked at having such a meeting. "This is stupid! We can't all go and meet privately and try to get our stories straight, because this matter was just referred to the ethics committee," he told Hastert, according to the same source. "In fact, none of us are supposed to be talking to each other, because we are not supposed to talk to potential witnesses." Worse, added Reynolds, "I can tell you anything we say at this leadership meeting is something we have to share with the ethics committee."

The meeting eventually became a conference call, but without Reynolds's participation.

Read the whole thing here.