See followup story below:
HOUSE ETHICS PANEL DECIDES NOT
TO PRESS CHARGES IN FOLEY CASE

By Gary Mussell,
Reprinted with permission.

10/04/2006, Florida – By now it is old news that Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fl) has resigned from Congress in the wake of questions about e-mails he wrote to at least two former male Pages. What may not be well known to the nudist community is Foley’s infamous role a few years ago in the controversy over the AANR Youth Camps.

In 2003, Foley led the attack against the AANR Youth Camp program after an article promoting the program appeared in the New York Times on June 18 and the following week in Time magazine. At the time, Foley was an undeclared candidate for the U.S. Senate from Florida, and he needed an issue. It was known among political insiders that he was gay, and if that knowledge got out in the Republican primary, his election chances were nil.

Foley, who co-chaired the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children's Caucus since 1998, saw the newspaper article and immediately issued a press release calling youth camps at nudist facilities to be a "reprehensible exploitation of children…that "subjects impressionable youths to denigrating and dangerous behavior and could expose them to pedophiles.”

He called on Florida Governor Jeb Bush to determine whether the camp was legal and to consider toughening state statutes against such activities. “Obviously I have no way of knowing whether illegal behavior is taking place in this camp, but the situation clearly raises legitimate issues that should be addressed given that it involves minor children,” Foley, R-West Palm Beach, said in the letter.

Wow. Talk about irony.

During that summer three years ago, news pundits and late night comics had a field day with the question whether such Camps should exist. AANR, taking the advice of its legal counsel and public relations firm, decided to remain silent, but that only fed the media frenzy as only the antinudist side of the story was getting told.

Soon, a state lawmaker in Texas filed a legislative bill to outlaw nude camps for children, and a Florida lawmaker threatened to do the same there. Virginia ultimately passed legislation forbidding such activities unless the child’s parents were in attendance. On July 7, 2003, Haulover Beach activist Shirley Mason arranged a meeting with Foley at his district office to discuss the situation. Also present were representatives from several local nudist resorts as well as a few Naturist Society representatives. AANR refused the invitation, remaining true to their strategy of silence.

Foley was polite and attentive at the meeting, we were told. The nudist group presented him with facts about the safety of children at resorts he may not have been aware of. However, it was clear he wasn’t willing to back off this sure-fired election year issue.

Two months later, AANR finally accepted an invitation from John Walsh, whose daytime episode “Nudist Youth Camp: Healthy or Harmful?” televised on September 9, 2003, turned out to be an ambush. With a stacked audience applauding his every utterance, Walsh called the camps “child abuse on a grand scale.” Also appearing on that show was Rep Mark Foley, claiming to be “protecting our children from potential pedophiles” and promoting his Volunteers for Children legislation. Walsh ended the show by lauding Foley’s efforts and declaring, “nudist kids are a pedophile’s dream.” I wonder how Walsh feels now.

As we write this story, new information about Foley’s relationships with under-age Capitol Hill pages is being revealed almost every hour. But one fact that cannot be overlooked is that his email exchanges with one sixteen year old was taking place at the same time as he was pounding the press over the AANR Youth program.

It took another month for the AANR camp controversy to die in the press. Foley decided not to seek the open Senate seat after opponents threatened to “out” his sexual orientation. He returned to serve a sixth term in the House, and he was promoted to Deputy Republican Whip, third in the GOP leadership hierarchy after Speaker Dennis Hastert. And from this position of power he continued to text message suggestive emails to a yet-unknown number of under-age Congressional pages, and perhaps to others, until he was outed – and ousted – on September 29, last week.

In response to Foley’s resignation, the AANR national office issued the following statement to its affiliated clubs: “Three years ago, the Congressman read a brief newspaper account of our camps and took less than two hours to frame an inaccurate opinion of those camps. He then communicated that opinion as well as several significant untruths which were then erroneously repeated as “facts” in the media [during] the weeks that followed…We will NOT make a similar mistake. Inaccuracies – about whomever they are voiced – can be very destructive things. We trust that legitimate information will emerge in this matter, but we recognize that speculation on our part is not going to make that happen.” So once again, AANR decides to be mum. During the coming weeks, we will no doubt hear more accusations and revelations about who knew what and when, and more members of Congress may be forced out of their closets, or forced to resign. The new media and talk show pundits are having a feeding frenzy at Foley’s – and the Republican party’s- expense.

Forgive me, AANR, if I crack a satisfied smile. Just a little one.

12/9/2006, Washington DC – The House Ethics Committee said Friday that GOP lawmakers and staff members for years remained "willfully ignorant" that former Rep. Mark Foley was making sexual advances toward male congressional pages.

Driven by political considerations and fear of exposing Foley's homosexuality, the committee concluded the House leadership failed in their duty to protect the teenagers. The panel report also concluded that Congressional officials ignored evidence of predatory behavior by the Florida Republican that began emerging more than 10 years ago.

Despite these criticisms, the bipartisan ethics panel found that no House rules were broken in the handling of the Foley case. And though it noted that senior advisors to outgoing House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) were among those who were warned years ago of Foley's improprieties, the committee did not determine there had been a systematic cover-up of the matter. The report's lack of sanctions drew quick condemnation from government reform groups, which characterized the committee's nine-week investigation as a sham.

"It's just unfathomable how you can reach the conclusion that wrongdoing occurred … but no one did it," said Fred Wertheimer, president of the independent watchdog group Democracy 21. "This is a classic demonstration of one of the fundamental ethics problems [in Congress]. They don't have a real system for enforcement."

The powers of the Ethics Committee to investigate and punish members of Congress for wrongdoing were emasculated a year ago by Speaker Dennis Hastert to protect Tom DeLay from possible censure in the Abramhoff lobbying scandal.

It is therefore more than ironic that Hastert issued a brief statement yesterday in which he praised the Ethics panel's work in the Foley matter and said he was "glad the committee made clear that there was no violation of any House rules by any member or staff." The Ethics Committee probe began after news reports in late September of sexually explicit messages between Foley, 52, and a former House page, revelations that caused the 12-year House member to immediately resign his seat.

Although the committee did not call for any penalties against any of those linked to the controversy, it also did not find much honor in the way a succession of congressional officials responded as questions arose about Foley's actions.

As far back as the mid-1990s, the investigation found, House officials learned of warning signs that Foley had an inappropriate interest in pages.

Foley tried to visit the pages' residence hall after curfew on at least two occasions, once while he may have been intoxicated, according to the report.

In 2001, a former page who had been sponsored by Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) complained to Kolbe that Foley had sent him a sexually explicit message. And in 2002, Foley used frequentflier miles to bring a former page to Washington to visit him.

The committee's report is particularly critical of Kolbe, who, according to the former page, later told the page not to share information about Foley's message. Kolbe denied to the committee that he tried to silence the former page.

Even in 2005, when a series of suggestive e-mails from Foley to a former page in Louisiana prompted more complaints, House leaders did little but ask Foley to stop the communications, the committee found.

The committee reported that it could not "determine conclusively" why officials had not acted more aggressively. It also noted that "there is some evidence that political considerations played a role."

Addressing conflicting reports about when Hastert was alerted to Foley's communications with the former Louisiana page, the committee wrote: "The weight of the evidence supports the conclusion that Speaker Hastert was told, at least in passing, about the e-mails" months before Foley resigned.

House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) and Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), head of the party's congressional campaign committee, contradicted Hastert's account. Boehner and Reynolds said they alerted Hastert early this year.

Rep. Howard L. Berman of Valley Village, the committee's ranking Democrat, said the investigation's "most important contribution" would be "to tell the story of what happened."

But the panel's decision not to recommend any punishment for any official threatens to weaken its effect at a time when Democrats are promising to treat ethics more seriously than did the departing GOP majority.

The committee could have officially rebuked those involved in the case. It also has the power to recommend expulsion of lawmakers. The full House would vote on such a recommendation. The Justice Department is conducting a criminal probe into the handling of the Foley case.