House Speaker Dennis Hastert must do the only right thing, and resign his speakership at once. Either he was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation, for not even remembering the order of events leading up to last week's revelations -- or he deliberately looked the other way in hopes that a brewing scandal would simply blow away. He gave phony answers Friday to the old and ever-relevant questions of what did he know and when did he know it? Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance.
This morning on CNN, Soledad O’Brien asked Tony Snow why “any communication between a 16-year-old and a congressman” didn’t “raise red flags — major, massive red flags” with Speaker Dennis Hastert and others who have known about the communications for months.
Snow responded, “I hate to tell you, but it’s not always pretty up there on Capitol Hill. And there have been other scandals, as you know, that have been more than simply naughty e-mails.”
The premise of Hastert's letter is that the only issue worth investigating is whether someone specifically knew of the more explicit IMs, and that anyone who did not know of those IMs by definition has done nothing wrong, even if -- as is true for Hastert -- there was ample other information they knew of regarding Foley's conduct. This is how Hastert defines what ought to be investigated (emphasis added):
Unlike the first communication, the second communication was a set of instant messages that contained sexually explicit statements and were reportedly generated three years ago. Last week, ABC News first reported these sexually explicit instant messages which led to Representative Foley's resignation. These sexually explicit communications warrant a criminal referral in two respects.
Hastert has defined the relevant issues in such a way as to ensure that he and his House allies would be excluded from the investigation just as long as they managed to avoid learning about the IMs specifically.
But the scandal here is that Hastert and friends deliberately avoided investigating the glaring signs that Foley was sexually pursuing pages.
A Republican staff member warned congressional pages five years ago to watch out for Congressman Mark Foley, according to a former page.
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Several Democratic pages tell ABC News they received no such warnings about Foley.
Reynolds's personal PAC, TOMPAC, wrote Foley a check for $5,000 on May 10, 2006.
According to the AP, Reynolds was told of the allegations against Foley "sometime this spring."
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UPDATE: Also: On July 27, 2006, the NRCC, which Reynolds chairs, accepted an unusually large contribution of $100,000 from Foley. Hard to imagine something of that size just slipping past the chairman.
House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post last night that he had learned this spring of inappropriate "contact" between Foley and a 16-year-old page. Boehner said he then told House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). Boehner later contacted The Post and said he could not remember whether he talked to Hastert.
WASHINGTON -- President Bush was unaware of the pending sale of shipping operations at six major U.S. seaports to a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates until the deal already had been approved by his administration, the White House said Wednesday.
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.
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If Libby's defense adopts strategies used by North, it might be in part because the strategies largely worked for North and in part because Libby's defense team has quietly retained John D. Cline, who was a defense attorney for North. Cline, a San-Francisco partner at the Jones Day law firm, has specialized in the use of classified information in defending clients charged with wrongdoing in national security cases.
Among his detractors, Cline is what is known as a "graymail" specialist-an attorney who, critics say, purposely makes onerous demands on the federal government to disclose classified information in the course of defending his clients, in an effort to force the government to dismiss the charges. Although Cline declined to be interviewed for this story, he has said that the use of classified information is necessary in assuring that defendants are accorded due process and receive fair trials.
Last year, even though Bush talked endlessly about the supposed joys of private accounts, he never proposed a specific plan to Congress and never put privatization costs in the budget. But this year, with no fanfare whatsoever, Bush stuck a big Social Security privatization plan in the federal budget proposal, which he sent to Congress on Monday.
His plan would let people set up private accounts starting in 2010 and would divert more than $700 billion of Social Security tax revenues to pay for them over the first seven years.
Speaking to a Texas radio station and then to The New York Times, Mr. Deutsch said the scientist, James E. Hansen, exaggerated the threat of [global] warming and tried to cast the Bush administration's response to it as inadequate.
After receiving an internal e-mail indicating an extreme state of unrest at the Social Security Administration, Representative Henry Waxman (D-CA) has written Speaker Hastert regarding the situation.
Currently, nearly 50 million Americans rely on Social Security.
Waxman claims that other internal documents indicate a "hemorrhaging" at Social Security call centers, and a flood of inaccurate information to seniors regarding the prescription drug plan.
Attached to Waxman's letter was, in its entirety, a message sent from Deputy Commissioner of Operations Linda McMahon to all Social Security Administration Operations employees. The document paints a very dire picture of conditions at the agency.
If the White House can’t find the photos, prosecutors already know where to look. The Washingtonian has seen five photos of the President with Abramoff or his family. One photo shows the President and Abramoff shaking hands at a meeting in the Old Executive Office Building, where a bearded-Abramoff introduced Bush to several of the lobbyist’s native-American clients.
Abramoff was named a “pioneer” in the Bush presidential campaign, collecting more than $100,000, in $2,000 maximum increments, for his campaign in 2004. Bush has returned $6,000 of Abramoff’s contributions, the part that would represent the legal limit for Abramoff; his wife, Pam; and a client.
Sources say the photographs are being kept safe. Abramoff would tell prosecutors, if asked, that not only did he know the President, but the President knew the names of Abramoff’s children and asked about them during their meetings. At one such photo session, Bush discussed the fact that both he and Abramoff were fathers of twins.
In one shot that TIME saw, Bush appears with Abramoff, several unidentified people and Raul Garza Sr., a Texan Abramoff represented who was then chairman of the Kickapoo Indians, which owned a casino in southern Texas. Garza, who is wearing jeans and a bolo tie in the picture, told TIME that Bush greeted him as "Jefe," or "chief" in Spanish. Another photo shows Bush shaking hands with Abramoff in front of a window and a blue drape. The shot bears Bush's signature, perhaps made by a machine. Three other photos are of Bush, Abramoff and, in each view, one of the lobbyist's sons (three of his five children are boys). A sixth picture shows several Abramoff children with Bush and House Speaker Dennis Hastert, who is now pushing to tighten lobbying laws after declining to do so last year when the scandal was in its early stages.
But last week, a prominent client of Abramoff's former law firm offered fresh revelations linking Abramoff to DeLay's office, saying it had sent $25,000 to an Abramoff-linked Orthodox Jewish group in 2000 as part of a lobbying campaign to thwart a proposed postal rate increase. That money appears to have then been paid to the wife of Tony C. Rudy, the deputy chief of staff of then-House Majority Whip DeLay who was helping to spearhead efforts against the increase.
Under the plea agreement made public Tuesday, Abramoff said that he and others sought Rudy's agreement to help torpedo the postal rate increase and a prohibition on Internet gambling. "With the intent to influence those official acts," the documents say, Abramoff provided "things of value, including but not limited to . . . ten equal monthly payments totaling $50,000" to the wife of a congressional aide called "staffer A" but identified elsewhere as Rudy. Those payments came from clients "that would and did benefit" from Rudy's actions.
The Washington Post had previously reported that $25,000 had come from eLottery Inc., an Internet gambling firm and Abramoff client, which sent the money to a Seattle-based foundation, Toward Tradition, that then paid fees to Rudy's wife, Lisa.
On Friday, the Magazine Publishers of America, which had hired Abramoff's firm Preston Gates Ellis & Rouvelas Meeds LLP in 2000 for a $10 million campaign against the postal rate increase, revealed where the other half came from.
"I can confirm that based on direction from Preston Gates, the MPA did make a $25,000 contribution to Toward Tradition in 2000," said MPA spokesman Howard J. Rubenstein. The MPA directors "had absolutely no knowledge of how the money would be used, and if it turns out that it was used for an improper purpose, they would be, quite frankly, outraged."
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