many homosexuals among them? There have been numerous scandals that involve republicans who yearn for sexual relations with another male.

Secret Life
Mark Foley's explicit e-mails could bring down the GOP. His story, and the fallout.
By Evan Thomas
Newsweek

Oct. 16, 2006 issue - In uptight, colorless Washington, Congressman Mark Foley, 52, Republican of Florida, was a bon vivant. He loved parties and making jokes; he did a wicked Bill Clinton imitation; he loved to talk about sex. He had to be a little bit careful, however. A gay man, he might bring a boyfriend to private parties, friends say, but when he appeared on the official cocktail circuit, he went alone or with a woman. He also hid, or tried to hide, his interest in younger men—much younger men, including the teenagers who can be seen scurrying around Capitol Hill toting the mail and taking in, at least in theory, a firsthand civics lesson. The House pages, the 70-or-so high-schoolers who spend up to a year in Washington running errands for congressmen, live in a squat red-brick dormitory at 501 First Street Southeast, less than five blocks from the Capitol. The building once housed Roman Catholic nuns who worked at a nearby hospital. The teenage pages are chaperoned by six staffers and are warned to stay away from drugs and alcohol. Only steps away from the pages' dorm is a bar called Bullfeathers, where lobbyists take Hill staffers to down martinis. Two blocks away is the Cannon House Office Building, where Congressman Foley had his office.

On one night in 2002 or 2003, an allegedly inebriated Foley showed up at the pages' dorm after a 10 p.m. curfew and tried to gain entry, according to an account provided by two congressional sources, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the matter. Foley was turned away by a guard. It is not known if the pages were ever aware that Foley lurked outside their door, but word of the incident reached the House Clerk, who notified Foley's chief of staff, Kirk Fordham.

This was not the first time that Fordham had learned of his boss's behaving, in that modern all-purpose euphemism, "inappropriately." Fordham decided that it was time to go to a higher authority, so he went to see Scott Palmer, chief of staff to the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert. That, at least, is what Fordham is prepared to tell investigators, according to a knowledgeable source who requested anonymity in discussing the probe. Palmer has already accused Fordham of dissembling, and Washington is settling in for one of its periodic melodramas of moralizing and prurience.

The secret world of Mark Foley—and the denial and bumbling of the House leaders who possibly did not want to know too much about that world—is beginning to emerge in bits and pieces of lurid detail. What actually happened—from the moment that Hill staffers first became aware of Congressman Foley's unusual interest in teenage congressional pages—is the source of intrigue, finger-pointing, shock, fear and loathing on Capitol Hill and of endless fascination around the country. No wonder: the political fortunes of the Republican Party hang in the balance.

Voters may not understand the legalistic ins-and-outs of campaign-finance scandals or know much about an influence peddler like Jack Abramoff beyond his name. But they can follow the details of a sex scandal, especially one that they can imagine harming their own children. It was not necessary to read Foley's leering (and worse) e-mails and instant messages to former congressional pages—in one, he asks "Do I make you a little horny?"—to be disgusted by an obvious abuse of power and trust. If enough voters express their feelings about the scandal at the polls in November (or by just staying home), the Republicans could lose control of Congress.

It is too early to know exactly why the Republicans failed to heed the warning signs about Foley's interest in the pages. Staffers raised concerns, the Speaker's office was notified and Rep. John Shimkus, head of the House Page Board, was dispatched to caution Foley and warn him away from the pages. But nobody bothered to investigate further—a step that might have uncovered the broader pattern of predatory behavior now evident.

There are plenty of theories about why the leadership did not take the matter more seriously. In the Washington power culture, incumbents are generally protected from the consequences of their own actions. That's especially true in a Congress where one party has ruled both houses for years; the concept of meaningful oversight has been essentially forgotten. And in a party ruled largely by conservatives, and built with the help of evangelicals, many of whom view homosexuality as unnatural and homosexual acts as sinful, leaders may also have had a special reluctance to scrutinize the sexual behavior of their colleagues or their staffs.

Inevitably, Washington was rife with nasty rumors of a "Velvet Mafia" of gay Hill staffers conspiring to protect each other. But Foley's homosexuality should not be the central issue in the scandal. His wrongdoing was to sexually prey on teenagers. Sexual orientation has nothing to do with sexual predation, and to suggest otherwise is to dredge up ugly stereotypes that are factually wrong (according to a 2000 Justice Department study, 97 percent of adults who sexually assault 12- to 17-year-old children are male—and 90 percent of their victims are female). Nonetheless, it is relevant that Foley is both homosexual and a Republican.

A number of top GOP staffers on Capitol Hill are gay and, generally speaking, most do not advertise their sexual orientation. Some staffers may believe that their place at the pinnacle of power could be compromised if their private lives were publicly known. Republican leaders on the Hill may not want to know too much about the sexual orientation of a fellow Republican congressman, like Foley, or even their staffers. They may wish to be in a position to deny any knowledge. If there were any efforts among gay staffers to protect Foley, they may have been motivated by personal considerations, or an effort to protect the GOP's rule on Capitol Hill. "The notion that there's a cabal and they're closing ranks and protecting one another because they're gay is reprehensible," says Brian Bennett, who came out after serving as chief of staff to former congressman Bob Dornan, a fierce right-winger. "People protect each other because they're friends."

Republicans have been tripping over each other for days trying to get their stories straight on who knew what and when. The various explanations have only served to obfuscate. In the end, the Republicans may not be able to escape the irony of the Foley scandal. In 2004, the GOP helped get President George W. Bush re-elected by turning out the base, especially the Christian right, to vote for state bans on gay marriage. In 2006, the GOP may lose control of Congress because it didn't try harder to investigate a gay congressman who was also a sexual predator.

The man at the center of the scandal is, or was, by all accounts an unusually upbeat, buoyant politician. Raised in modest circumstances, Foley, the son of a Marine veteran of Guadalcanal, has been enamored with politics from the time he dropped out of Palm Beach Junior College to start a small restaurant. A moderate Republican, he became a fixture in the glitzy Palm Beach social scene, hobnobbing with the wealthy at places like Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. Foley was "just easy to like," says Sid Dinerstein, chair of the Palm Beach County Republican Party. "He loved his job. He loved waking up in the morning to find another event to go to."

Foley did not exactly hide his sexual orientation. He was often spotted with his longtime companion, a well-to-do Palm Beach dermatologist, though Dinerstein says the two were careful not to sit together at big charity functions. From time to time, however, Foley had to evade questions. Asked by a local radio host when he first ran for Congress in 1994 "Is it true you're gay?" Foley replied, "I have a girlfriend." He said the woman lived in Miami and spent time in Washington. In 2003, Foley backed out of a bid for the Senate, ostensibly to care for his sick father—but also, his friends suggested, because he did not want to withstand the inevitably increased scrutiny of his sexual orientation.

In Washington, Foley's homosexuality was an open secret. Gays active in Republican politics describe an informal "don't ask, don't tell" rule: gay staffers can be out of the closet, as long as they aren't too public about it. The party leadership apparently welcomed Foley: he raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for GOP campaign coffers. Radical gay groups sometimes try to out closeted GOP congressmen, but Foley believed he had some protection. He could not be accused of hypocrisy because he voted against a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.

Still, Foley was subject to the jeers of at least one openly gay Democratic congressman. Last week Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts told the Advocate.com, a gay news site, "Once, at a congressional Christmas party at the White House, my ex-boyfriend Herb went up to Foley, who was with a female date, and said to him, 'Why don't you get a real date?' Foley didn't say anything."

Foley was sexually active in Washington, according to a gay Republican who declined to be identified discussing Foley's private life. Because he had a longtime partner, he told a friend, he preferred to have affairs with men who also had boyfriends. That way, he explained, they both had something to lose. Foley jokingly described this practice as "mutually assured destruction," said this friend.

much more
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15178112/site/newsweek/

LA Times:

The FBI has begun contacting former pages, and at least one — a deputy campaign manager for Rep. Ernest Istook, an Oklahoma Republican who is running for governor there — has hired a criminal defense lawyer, according to a published report. Istook issued a statement last week urging the media to protect the young man's privacy after his name was briefly posted on the ABC News website.

-- 101 ways to avoid the subjunctive mood

Sunday, Oct. 8, 2006
End of the Revolution

Sex, lies and power games are just the latest symptoms of a Republican party adrift from its ideals

By KAREN TUMULTY

Every revolution begins with the power of an idea and ends when clinging to power is the only idea left. The epitaph for the movement that started when Newt Gingrich and his forces rose from the back bench of the House chamber in 1994 may well have been written last week in the same medium that incubated it: talk radio. On conservative commentator Laura Ingraham's show, the longest-serving Republican House Speaker in history explained why he would not resign despite a sex scandal that has produced a hail of questions about his leadership and the failure to stop one of his members from cyberstalking teenage congressional pages. "If I fold up my tent and leave," Dennis Hastert told her, "then where does that leave us? If the Democrats sweep, then we'd have no ability to fight back and get our message out."

That quiet admission may have been the most damning one yet in the unfolding scandal surrounding Florida Congressman Mark Foley: holding on to power has become not just the means but also the end for the onetime reformers who in 1994 unseated a calcified and corrupted Democratic majority. Washington scandals, it seems, have been following a Moore's law of their own, coming at a faster clip every time there is a shift in control. It took 40 years for the House Democrats to exhaust their goodwill. It may take only 12 years for the Republicans to get there.

If you think politicians clinging to power isn't big news, then you may have forgotten the pure zeal of Gingrich's original revolutionaries. They swept into Washington on the single promise that they would change Capitol Hill. And for a time, they did. Vowing to finish what Ronald Reagan had started, they stood firm on the three principles that defined conservatism: fiscal responsibility, national security and moral values. Reagan, who had a few scandals in his day, didn't always follow his own rules. But his doctrine turned out to be a good set of talking points for winning elections in a closely divided country, and the takeover was completed with the inauguration of George W. Bush as President.

But after controlling both houses of Congress and the White House for most of Bush's six years in office, the party has a governing record that has come unmoored from those Grand Old Party ideals. The exquisite political machinery that aces the elections has begun to betray the platform. To win votes back home, lawmakers have been spending taxpayer money like sailors on leave, producing the biggest budget deficits in U.S. history. And the party's approach to national security has taken the country into a war that most Americans now believe was a mistake and that the government's own intelligence experts say has shaped "a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

One of the problems is that after the Republicans got into power, the system began to change them, not just the other way around. Among the first promises the G.O.P. majority broke was the setting of term limits. Their longtime frustrations in the minority didn't necessarily make them any better at reaching across the aisle either. Compromise, that most central of congressional checks and balances, has been largely replaced by a kind of calculated cussedness that has left the G.O.P. isolated and exposed in times of crisis.

The current crisis arrived with a sex scandal that has muddied one of the G.O.P.'s few remaining patches of moral high ground: its defense of family values and personal accountability. Although Hastert and other Republican leaders say they heard last fall about the "overfriendly" approaches of a not-so-secretly-gay Congressman to a 16-year-old former page

Both majority leader John Boehner and campaign chairman Tom Reynolds say they brought it up with Hastert as long ago as last spring—they insist they never imagined anything like the more graphic instant messages that subsequently came to light. But shouldn't they have got chills at learning that a 52-year-old man had sent a teenager a creepy e-mail asking for a "pic of you"? Certainly the page understood what the e-mail meant, which is why he forwarded it in August 2005 to the office of Louisiana Congressman Rodney Alexander, who had sponsored him for the page program. "This freaked me out," the teenager wrote. "Sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick."

The House response was political from the start. Last November, Jeff Trandahl, then clerk of the House, told John Shimkus, the Republican head of the board that oversees the page program, about the less incriminating e-mails. But nobody bothered to inform the board's lone Democrat. Shimkus and Trandahl appear to have done nothing more than give Foley a private warning. When Alexander expanded the circle of those aware of the e-mails the following spring, one of the two people he chose to loop in was Reynolds, head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, whose job is managing the election. Foley wasn't even stripped of his co-chairmanship of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children.

Even after a batch of truly sleazy instant messages was discovered by abc News, Reynolds' chief of staff Kirk Fordham, who was also a former aide to Foley, tried to solve the political problem by attempting to talk the network out of publishing the worst of the messages. Fordham resigned last week, but he didn't go quietly, the way House leaders had hoped. On his way out, he threw fuel on the political fire by announcing that he had warned Hastert's staff of Foley's "inappropriate behavior" at least three years ago—a charge that Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, denied.

All this suggests that the Republican leaders were motivated much more by fear of electoral fallout than concern for the young pages in their care. And if they were worried that the revelation would hurt their chances of holding on to the House, they turned out to be right. Before the scandal broke, they were beginning to believe that the clouds were finally clearing for them. Their fabled get-out-the-vote and fund-raising operations were nearing full stride just as gas prices were dropping and the national debate was refocusing on their home-court issue of terrorism.

MORE
TIME

By Michael Grunwald and Chris Cillizza, Washington Post Staff Writers, Sunday, October 8, 2006; Page A01

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Rep. E. Clay Shaw Jr. (R-Fla.) was trying to talk about security Friday at bustling Port Everglades, but with planes roaring overhead and containers slamming onto trucks, nobody could hear him.

That's a common problem for Shaw and Republican candidates around the country these days -- trying urgently 30 days before Election Day to frame a winning message but finding their efforts drowned out by the furor over former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.).

"It's sucking all the air out of the room," Shaw said in an interview after his news conference at the port. "It's a tough time; there's just total saturation right now."

House Ethics Committee and FBI Will Try to Sort Out Who Knew What -- and When

By Charles Babington, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, October 8, 2006; Page A08

Despite countless hours of TV coverage and reams of newspaper reporting on the House's handling of the Mark Foley page scandal, numerous fundamental questions remain unanswered as the FBI and the House ethics committee begin their first full week of inquiries.

Gaps and inconsistencies in the public accounts include such basic matters as when House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and his top aides first learned of concerns about Foley's relationships with male pages, and what they did about it. Also unclear is which GOP officials decided that only two members of the six-person House Page Board should confront the Florida lawmaker.

And accounts differ on whether the two board members knew the exact contents of e-mails Foley sent last year to a teenage boy in Louisiana. Those messages alarmed the boy and his parents and set into motion the events that eventually would uncover far more sexually graphic messages to other former pages, triggering Foley's abrupt resignation a week ago.

Armed with subpoena power, investigators for the FBI and the ethics committee will pursue scores of questions, almost surely including:

Who decided to keep word of the Louisiana e-mails closely held, so that only a handful of House Republicans -- and no Democrats -- knew of them?

These days, it's hard not to feel like you're peering into the Republican big top, witnessing a three-ring political meltdown.

(On your left, ladies and gentlemen: the unravelling al Qaeda fiasco! On your right: the re-re-re-re-re-introduction of the Iraq conflagration! And, in the center ring, we bring you: the "family values party" sex scandal cover up!)

Playing it straight, today's front-page NYT write-up [Hastert Vows to Overcome Scandal] depicts Speaker Hastert as regrouping after half-a-week in a bumbling free fall. But, a drowning man doesn't go down before bobbing up for air a few times.

Hastert Unhinged

From John Aravosis at AMERICAblog again [Hastert: The buck stops with my staff], this pretty much sums up the current state of affairs:

• FACT: GOP staff, working for Republican Speaker Denny Hastert, warned the page class of 2001-2002 to stay away from Foley - five years ago.
• FACT: Former chief of staff to GOP Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), Kirk Fordham, says he warned Hastert's chief of staff of Foley's behavior three years ago. Whether or not you believe Fordham, his testimony is consistent with the other facts showing that the Republicans knew about Foley's behavior long before last week.
• FACT: Both Reps. John Boehner, the Republican House Majority Leader, and Tom Reynolds both say they told Dennis Hastert personally about the Foley issue months ago. Hastert says Boehner is lying. So one of the two most powerful Republicans in the House is lying about an investigation into a child sex predator. That deserves a separate investigation right there.
• FACT: Hastert's staff was informed of the Foley emails a year ago, but Hastert would like us to believe his staff simply never told him that a member of Congress, a member of his leadership team, was under investigation for preying sexually on young children - children who Hastert was responsible for.

By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON, Oct. 5 — J. Dennis Hastert, who was installed as House speaker eight years ago through backroom maneuvering in a moment of crisis for his party, has no distinct power base in Congress, not much of a national reputation and, in an age of television politics, little polish in front of the camera.

But Mr. Hastert has survived and survived to become the longest-serving Republican speaker. And on Thursday, standing outside his district office in Batavia, Ill., he made it clear that he did not intend to become a casualty of the Mark Foley scandal, saying he expected to win re-election to his seat and run for speaker again when the new Congress convenes in January.

Mr. Hastert made his statement soon after the leaders of the House ethics committee promised a vigorous investigation into the handling of the Foley case, approved dozens of subpoenas and said they expected to finish their work in weeks.

Mr. Foley, a Florida Republican, resigned from the House last Friday after being confronted by ABC News with sexually explicit messages he had sent to teenage pages.

By CARL HULSE AND JEFF ZELENY, October 8, 2006

WASHINGTON, Oct. 7 — A former senior aide to Mark Foley expects to go before the House ethics committee next week and testify under oath that he alerted the speaker’s office as early as 2003 to inappropriate contact with teenage pages by Mr. Foley, his lawyer said Saturday.

The former aide, Kirk Fordham, will also tell the panel that Scott Palmer, the longtime chief of staff to Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, later met with Mr. Foley to talk about his troubling interest in pages, though Mr. Fordham did not attend that meeting, said Timothy J. Heaphy, Mr. Fordham’s lawyer.

“He continues to stand by his claim that he alerted Scott Palmer to this incident with Foley, and he knows there was a subsequent meeting with Foley and Palmer,” said Mr. Heaphy, who contacted the ethics committee on Friday to offer Mr. Fordham as a witness. “Kirk is confident and ready to go under oath.”

Mr. Palmer has denied having such a discussion with Mr. Fordham, who was a top aide to Mr. Foley, a Florida Republican, until January 2004. The speaker’s office has said it had no inkling of Mr. Foley’s contact with pages until the family of a former page in Louisiana complained about a communication to their son from Mr. Foley in the fall of 2005.

Page scandal makes America look silly

October 8, 2006
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist

snip

And no, I'm not a "typical right-wing pedophile apologist" excusing Foley. But, in case you haven't noticed, he's gone. He quit quicker than his instant message. And, true, he's since done the usual contemptible redemption shtick, announcing he's going into alcohol rehab, etc., when the reality is he'd be a better man if he drank more and IMed teens about the size of their wedding tackle less. And yes, he'll get a book deal, just like New Jersey's revolting ex-governor. But no one will buy the book -- and besides, what do you want? When a member of the House of Lords went abroad after a homosexual scandal, King George V is said to have remarked, "Good God, I thought fellows like that shot themselves." It may, indeed, be a less revolting spectacle for a chap to take a tumbler of whiskey and a loaded revolver into his study than to go on "Oprah" and bore on about his personal demons, abusive father, etc., etc. But we live in different times. Foley's history; he's the first footnote in history to a page in history. So the only question now is whether there is any larger issue here worth spending 10 minutes on.

And the answer to that is obvious. This was a honey trap (as they used to say in the Cold War) designed to leverage one peripheral figure's squalid fantasies into political opportunity. It's as predictable as the leaves falling from the trees, except that it only occurs every other autumn. Still, I take my hat off to the media and Democratic Party. Indeed, in the spirit of Bill Clinton, I take my pants off to them. It is a remarkable achievement to have transformed, in little more than a week, the GOP into the Catholic Diocese of Boston with Speaker Hastert as Cardinal Law and the page program as the massed ranks of 7-year-old altar boys. What an awesome force the Dems would be if only the ruthless skill and cunning that went into this operation could be applied to, say, national security.

But I very much doubt, despite the expertise with which the sheep have been rounded up and set baa-ing, that Showtime at the Foley Bergere will pay off in November. There are many legitimate reasons for electors to toss out the Republican Congress, but the notion that they're a hotbed of gay pedophile enablers is not one of them. Had Foley dug in and attempted to cling on, his GOP colleagues would have been all over TV deploring his behavior, calling on him to step down, expressing outrage, etc. After two or three days, a few lefties might even have piped up to assail the Republican theocrat sexual McCarthyites tormenting the poor chap. Had he actually had sex with congressional pages, affronted gay groups would have pointed out this was perfectly legal in the relevant jurisdictions and would have complained ferociously about the stigmatizing of gay relationships and Democrats would have declared there should be places for all at the American table, especially had Foley done a Jim McGreevey and announced that "my truth is I am a gay American." A few quirks of timing and the parties' respective roles might have been entirely reversed. Scandalwise, the Republicans always play the submissive masochists but the Dems are bi-swingers, happy to flay the GOP as either (a) uptight prudes or (b) pedophile enablers, according to what suits. What would have been consistent in both narratives is the assumption by the Democrats, the media and the Gay Page Tip-Line end of the Republican Party is that the electorate is stupid. In the sense that there's any "child abuse" going on here, the American people are being treated like children and abused by the politico-media class.

This last week is unbecoming of a mature democracy. In the wider world, America can survive being the Great Sa- tan, but not the Great Laughingstock.

©Mark Steyn 2006

Are former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL) and former Speaker of the House Tom Foley (D-WA) related?

Page Notified GOP Rep. Kolbe

By Jonathan Weisman, Washington Post Staff Writer, Monday, October 9, 2006; Page A01

A Republican congressman knew of disgraced former representative Mark Foley's inappropriate Internet exchanges as far back as 2000 and personally confronted Foley about his communications.

A spokeswoman for Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) confirmed yesterday that a former page showed the congressman Internet messages that had made the youth feel uncomfortable with the direction Foley (R-Fla.) was taking their e-mail relationship. Last week, when the Foley matter erupted, a Kolbe staff member suggested to the former page that he take the matter to the clerk of the House, Karen Haas, said Kolbe's press secretary, Korenna Cline.

The revelation pushes back by at least five years the date when a member of Congress has acknowledged learning of Foley's behavior with former pages. A timeline issued by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) suggested that the first lawmakers to know, Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.), the chairman of the House Page Board, and Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.), became aware of "over-friendly" e-mails only last fall. It also expands the universe of players in the drama beyond members, either in leadership or on the page board.

A source with direct knowledge of Kolbe's involvement said the messages shared with Kolbe were sexually explicit, and he read the contents to The Washington Post under the condition that they not be reprinted. But Cline denied the source's characterization, saying only that the messages had made the former page feel uncomfortable. Nevertheless, she said, "corrective action" was taken. Cline said she has not yet determined whether that action went beyond Kolbe's confrontation with Foley.

US Mid-Term Elections Blog comes this insanity: Conservative Activists Considering Role of Gay Lawmakers

WASHINGTON, Oct. 5, 2006 — Conservative activists are beginning to discuss the Mark Foley scandal as indicative of a GOP that has become too tolerant of gays in their midst.

Regardless of the party's efforts against gay marriage, the argument goes, the fact that Republican officials accept gay congressmen, such as Foley, and staffers will mean the party will have problems.

"As a society, we've made diversity and tolerance the guidepost of public life," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council told ABC News. "Maybe we shouldn't be surprised that we have congressmen chasing after 16-year-old boys."

Is it me, or can these people not draw a proper conclusion to save their lives? -Raja

Gram the One Eyed Snake

In the wake of the burgeoning Foley instant-message fiasco, it appears that many who would rush to defend the status quo ante take the tack that this sort of thing goes on all the time. No one at this point will be unaware that Tony Snow declared, the Monday after Foley's resignation, "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."

By BRIAN SKOLOFF, Associated Press Writer
4:43 AM PDT, October 18, 2006

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Mark Foley plans to reveal the name of a clergyman he says abused him as a teenager, a move his attorney said would deflate claims the former congressman fabricated the allegations as an excuse for sending sexually explicit e-mails to teenage pages.

Gerald Richman, Foley's civil attorney, said Tuesday that Foley has been "keeping this deep dark secret inside of him for many years."

"He's dealing with this issue, but it's going to take a lot of time."

Foley, 52, a Florida Republican, resigned last month after he was confronted with the e-mails. He has not been charged with a crime.

Some have charged that Foley made up the allegations as an excuse or to elicit public sympathy.

MIAMI (CNS) -- The Archdiocese of Miami will reveal the name of the priest who allegedly abused former Congressman Mark Foley approximately 40 years ago once attorneys for Foley have supplied the information, the archdiocesan director of communications said Oct. 18. Mary Ross Agosta, who also directs the Safe Environment Program for the archdiocese, said Foley's attorneys wanted to disclose the name to attorney J. Patrick Fitzgerald, general counsel for both the Miami Archdiocese and the Diocese of Palm Beach. No meeting between the attorneys had been set as of the morning of Oct. 18, she said. Ross Agosta said that when church officials learn the name "we will report the name to the state attorney's office, offer psychological and pastoral counseling to the victim, announce the name and ask any other victims to come forward, and begin the healing process." In an Oct. 5 letter to Foley attorney David Roth, Fitzgerald had asked that Foley reveal the name of the clergyman he said abused him.

Priest Acknowledges Relationship With Foley

By Howard Schneider and Debbi Wilgoren
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, October 19, 2006; 11:06 AM

A retired priest from Malta acknowledged today that he had intimate contact with a youthful Mark Foley in the mid-1960s that involved nudity and -- on at least one occasion -- "light touching," but denied that he had "sexual intercourse" with him.

The Rev. Anthony Mercieca, in a telephone interview with The Washington Post from the Maltese island of Gozo, said he was surprised that his long-ago relationship with Foley had become linked to the former Congressman's troubles. Foley, a former altar boy at the Sacred Heart Catholic church where Mercieca served in the mid-1960s, resigned from Congress after reports about sexually intimate electronic messages he had sent to Congressional pages.

Following his resignation, Foley entered alcohol rehabilitation, said he was gay, and alleged that he had been sexually abused by a member of the clergy as a youth.

Catholic Church officials have encouraged Foley to name the priest involved, and Foley was expected to turn that information over to the Florida law enforcement authorities yesterday. As of last night, however, Florida officials said no name had been provided.

This morning the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, citing confidential sources close to Foley's family, identified Mercieca as the priest in question. Though Mercieca confirmed his past ties to Foley this morning in an interview with The Post, there has been no independent confirmation that Foley was referring to Mercieca in his allegations, or whether there may be another priest involved.

In the interview, Mercieca, 69, said that issues like molestation and sexual harassment are "in the eye of the beholder," and that Foley -- who was 12 or 13 at the time -- might have interpreted some of their contact "the wrong way."

"I was a little out of myself there," Mercieca said, from his use of medication following what the Sarasota paper described as a nervous breakdown. "The whole idea is . . . that I did something that he did not like, but at the time he did not say anything."

Mercieca said that he regarded their trips to skinny dip in Lake Worth, Fla., or to local saunas, as well within the cultural bounds he learned in Brazil, where he said he attended seminary and spent his first years as a priest.

"We had some kind of friendship. I was very friendly with him and his family," said Mercieca. "Then almost forty years passed without him saying anything. . . . And now because he got caught he recited these things."

In Brazil "they skinny dip all the time and no one gets scandalized. It is part of the culture. It is natural," Mercieca said. "They don't make an issue out of a skinny dip in the park or a massage."

"It was not what you call intercourse. . . . There was no rape or anything. . . . Maybe light touches here or there," said Mercieca.

Mercieca said he could not explain why Foley might be attributing his broader problems to their contact.

A House ethics panel is investigating how Congressional leaders dealt with reports about Foley's conduct with pages. Catholic officials in Florida have said they would release the name of the accused priest after consulting with prosecutors in Palm Beach County, and reviewing the priest's history. They said they would encourage any other potential victims to come forward.

An employee at the civil law firm that is representing Foley said his attorney, Gerald F. Richman, had no comment on Mercieca at this point.

Mercieca said he did not expect to be sued or prosecuted criminally over his ties to Foley. For criminal cases, the statute of limitations has expired.

bit more