Republican leaders in the United States Congress broke no rules but were negligent in their handling of a scandal involving a fellow lawmaker’s advances toward male aides, an ethics committee said.
The House of Representatives’ ethics committee issued its findings on Friday after an investigation into the SMS sex scandal surrounding Republican Mark Foley, who resigned on September 29 amid allegations he sent inappropriate e-mails and SMSes messages to young male aides working in the chamber.
Republican leaders in the House displayed ”a disconcerting unwillingness to take responsibility” for addressing concerns about Foley’s conduct, even though questions arose about the lawmaker’s overtures to young aides more than ten years earlier, the report said.
”Rather than addressing the issues fully, some witnesses did far too little, while attempting to pass the responsibility for acting to others,” said the report, prepared by a bipartisan group of Democrats and Republicans.
”In all, a pattern of conduct was exhibited among many individuals to remain willfully ignorant of the potential consequences of former Representative Foley’s conduct with respect to House pages,” it said.
The Foley scandal, which broke just weeks before legislative elections on November 7, has been cited as a contributing factor in the Republicans’ defeat at the hands of the Democrats, who won back control of Congress for the first time since 1994.
The outgoing speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, has maintained he was not aware of the concerns about Foley until the lawmaker resigned his seat on September 29. But the probe contradicted Hastert’s account, saying ”the weight of evidence” indicated the Republican leader was told about Foley’s e-mails months earlier.
The report was the result of sworn testimony from eight members of the House and 43 other witnesses.
Foley was known in Congress as a champion of children’s rights, especially against abuse and sexual predators, and had recently introduced legislation to crack down on internet child pornography sites. – Sapa-AFP