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US sex e-mail scandal deepens
02/10/2006 09:03 - (SA)
Washington - Republican leaders in the US house of representatives should be questioned under oath on how much they knew of former congressman Mark Foley's inappropriate e-mails to teenage male congressional pages, house Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said on Sunday.
Pelosi also said the house ethics committee should start its investigation into the matter immediately. Other Democrats said house Republican leaders should step down if they were aware that Foley, who resigned from the house on Friday, was sending inappropriate messages and did nothing about it.
The scandal, breaking just weeks before the November 7 election
to determine control of congress, has shaken Republicans who
often accuse their opponents of being lacking on moral issues.
"I think anyone should resign, any leader that knew about
this should resign, absolutely," Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democratic contender for the US senate, said on NBC's Meet the Press.
Republicans knew of e-mails
Top house Republicans acknowledged on Saturday that they
had been aware of e-mail traffic between Foley and a former
teenage page, but that they were not aware of the sexually
explicit messages to other pages revealed last week.
Foley, 52, a six-term Florida Republican, resigned after
ABC News reported he sent messages containing references to
sexual organs and acts to current and former congressional
pages - who answer telephones, deliver documents and run other
errands for members of congress.
Foley was chairperson of the house caucus on missing and
exploited children, and the author of the key sexual predator
provisions of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of
2006, which President George W Bush signed in July.
No action taken
Pelosi of California, in a letter to the house ethics
committee, said it was "abhorrent" that house Republican
leaders knew of Foley's contacts with a teenage page for "for
six months to a year ... and that apparently no action was
taken to protect these underage children".
Central to the ethics committee investigation is
"immediately questioning, under oath, the house Republican
leadership," Pelosi said.
Criminal investigation
House Republican leaders on Saturday called for a criminal
investigation into Foley's actions.
Staff for the Republican leader, speaker Dennis Hastert of
Illinois, said they had been alerted to an exchange between
Foley and one congressional page in the fall of 2005 but were
not told about any sexually explicit e-mails or text messages,
according to a statement issued by the speaker's office.
They said Foley had been warned to stop any such contact
and that Hastert did not become aware of the incident until the
spring of 2006.
Democrats said the matter should be investigated before the
election and questioned whether top Republicans had tried to
conceal it.
- Reuters
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