Democrats, White House call for investigation into e-mail scandal

WASHINGTON -- Democrats demanded Sunday that House Republicans keep them in the loop and thoroughly investigate former Rep. Mark Foley's inappropriate e-mails to a 16-year-old boy. The White House went further, suggesting the need for a criminal probe.\n"This should be investigated objectively. I think the Democratic leadership should have been told 10 months ago," said Rep. Jane Harman of California, top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. "I gather that basically nothing was done except that Foley was warned."\nFoley, R-Fla., quit Congress on Friday after the disclosure of the e-mails he sent to a former congressional page in the House, and the sexually suggestive instant messages that the five-term congressman from West Palm Beach sent to other high school pages.\nHouse Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., maintained at first that he had learned only last week about the e-mails. Hastert acknowledged over the weekend that his aides had, in fact, referred the matter to the House clerk and to the congressman who was chairman of the board that oversees the page program.\nHastert's office said, however, it had not known the e-mails were anything more than "over-friendly."\nMajority Republicans engineered a House vote Friday that refers the Foley matter to the House ethics committee but lets that panel decide whether there should even be an investigation.\nRep. Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader, pressed the committee Sunday to begin investigating and make a preliminary report within 10 days.\n"The children, their parents, the public and our colleagues must be assured that such abhorrent behavior is not tolerated and will never happen again," she wrote the committee's leaders.\nPelosi, D-Calif., demanded to know who knew of the messages, whether Foley had other contacts with pages and when the Republican leadership was notified of Foley's conduct.\nWhite House counselor Dan Bartlett said the allegations against Foley were shocking and that President George W. Bush had not learned of the e-mails before the news broke.\nBartlett said House leaders were pursuing the matter aggressively enough that an independent outside investigation was not warranted.\n"There is going to be, I'm sure, a criminal investigation into the particulars of this case," Bartlett said. "We need to make sure that the page system is one in which children come up here and can work and make sure that they are protected."\n"If you take the allegations at face value, I think there'd have to be at least a preliminary look to see if there's any breaking of criminal law," Bartlett added. "I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know all the particulars of the case, but I think this is going to get a lot of scrutiny, and it should get a lot of scrutiny."\nCongressional pages have been a staple of Washington politics since the 1820s. Each year, high school students who have competed for the honor don navy jackets and white shirts and serve as temporary gofers in the House and Senate. The program, involving classes and dormitory life, nearly ended in the early 1980s, due to alleged sexual misconduct and drug use.\nRepublican leaders say it is their duty to ensure House pages' safety and are now creating a toll-free hotline for pages and their families to call to confidentially report any incidents. They also will consider adopting new rules on communications between lawmakers and pages.\nRep. John Murtha, D-Pa., said it was outrageous the House GOP leadership had not acted sooner. \n"It really makes me nervous that they might have tried to cover this up," he said.\nMurtha said the House ethics committee should conclude its work on the Foley case before the November elections so that voters can "hold people accountable." Doing so, he said, might help restore public confidence, since already "the reputation of Congress under the Republican leadership is lower than used car salesmen."\nRep. Thomas Reynolds, head of the House Republican election effort, said Saturday he told Hastert months ago about concerns Foley sent inappropriate messages to a teenage boy. Reynolds, R-N.Y., is under attack from Democrats who say he did too little to protect the boy.\nFoley, who is 52 and single, was co-chairman of the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus. In a statement Friday, the lawmaker said, "I am deeply sorry and I apologize for letting down my family and the people of Florida I have had the privilege to represent."\nThe boy who received the e-mails was 16 in the summer of 2005 when he was a House page. After his return home to Louisiana, Foley e-mailed him and asked for a picture. That request was "sick" and "freaked me out," the boy said in an e-mail to a colleague in the office of Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., who had sponsored the boy in the House.