1:30 PM
The chief of staff for Republican Congressman Tom Reynolds, Kirk Fordham, resigned after questions were raised about his role in the handling of the congressional page scandal, according to Republican sources on Capitol Hill.
Those sources said Fordham, a former chief of staff for Congressman Mark Foley, had urged Republican leaders last spring not to raise questionable Foley e-mails with the full Congressional Page Board, made up of two Republicans and a Democrat.
"He begged them not to tell the page board," said one of the Republican sources.
People familiar with Fordham’s side of the story, however, said Fordham was being used as a scapegoat by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. They said Fordham had repeatedly warned Hastert’s staff about Foley’s "problem" with pages, but little was done.
The complaint about Foley was brought to the chairman of the page board, Congressman John Shimkus (R-IL), last spring, and he then consulted with the Clerk of the House of Representatives, Jeff Trandahl. At Fordham’s urging, according to the sources, the matter was not given to the full board, and instead Congressman Foley was privately approached and told to stop all contact with the page he had been e-mailing.
5:30 PM
A senior congressional aide said Wednesday that he alerted the House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office in 2004 about worrisome conduct by former Rep. Mark Foley with teenage pages — the earliest known alert to the GOP leadership.
Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had "more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene."
The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged.
Fordham resigned Wednesday as chief of staff to Rep. Thomas Reynolds, R-N.Y.
Fordham spoke to the AP after ABC News quoted unidentified GOP sources as insinuating that he had intervened on behalf of Foley, his former boss, to prevent an inquiry into Foley’s conduct. "This is categorically false," Fordham said. "At no point ever did I ask anyone to block any inquiries into Foley’s actions or behavior."
6:00 PM
House Majority Whip Roy Blunt said Wednesday he would have advised his congressional colleagues to ask more questions if he had been told earlier about former Rep. Mark Foley’s electronic communications with underage male pages.
Blunt said he learned of Foley’s actions when the news became public late last week.
He said he was not criticizing the House Republican leadership for its handling of the matter, but he said he would have handled it differently. Blunt noted he has experience handling difficult staff issues from past work as an administrator and as former president of Southwest Baptist University.
"As a former university president and somebody who’s had lots of people work for him over the years, I could have been helpful if I’d have known about this," Blunt said.
"I think I could have given some good advice here, which is you have to be curious, you have to ask all the questions you can think of," he said. "You absolutely can’t decide not to look into activities because one individual’s parents don’t want you to," he said.
Despite claims by senior congressional aide Kirk Fordham that he notified House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office more than two years ago about possible inappropriate contact between former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., and underage congressional pages, the Speaker’s office is insisting it did nothing wrong in its handling of the situation.
6:45 PM
But Fordham — a former chief of staff to Foley, who resigned as chief of staff to another member of the GOP leadership, Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y. — said that as far back as 2003, Hastert chief of staff Scott Palmer had been told that Foley was too friendly with pages. According to Fordham, Palmer spoke to Foley about the matter.
Neither Foley nor Palmer could be reached for comment, yet Hastert’s office disputes the account.
Fordham, who is openly gay, acknowledged helping Foley deal with the fallout from ABC News’s story about obscene instant messages he had sent former congressional pages, but Fordham added he "did so as a friend of my former boss, not as Cong. Reynolds’ chief of staff. I reached out to the Foley family, as any good friend would, because I was worried about their emotional well-being."
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