1 Boring Old Man

Foley, GOPers Pay for Scandal Lawyers With Campaign Funds

Former Congressman Mark Foley has spent more than $250,000 of his campaign funds on lawyers since he was exposed for having inappropriate sexual conversations with minors online. The law allows Foley to pay Zuckerman Spaeder LLP from his pot of over $1.5 million in campaign funds that he had amassed prior to the scandal.  Federal politicians can spend campaign money on their legal defense if they are facing charges relating to their conduct in office.

Foley is not the only figure in the scandal to run up a hefty bill with his lawyers using campaign funds. Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., has racked up over $130,000 in legal fees, Federal Election Commission filings show.  Some lawmakers and aides involved in the scandal said they had warned Hastert and his staff about questionable behavior by Foley years before sexually suggestive electronic conversations between Foley and young male pages surfaced.

And retired lawmaker Jim Kolbe from Arizona took a big hit in legal fees, paying out $120,000 in cash from his old campaign war chest to Wilmer Hale. The law firm employs former White House counsel Reginald Brown, whom Kolbe retained in December to represent him in twin investigations by the House Ethics Committee and the Department of Justice.

Former House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, has paid out $47,500 in legal fees from his campaign coffers recently. A staffer told ABC News the fees are unrelated to his role in the Foley scandal; he has been engaged in a legal battle with  Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., whom Boehner has accused of acting illegally in connection with a surreptitious recording of a 1997 conversation among GOP lawmakers.

Legal fees also piled up for Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y., former head of the House GOP’s political arm, who was also implicated in the scandal. Reynolds, like Boehner, said he warned Hastert about Foley after he learned of the questionable e-mail sent to a former page, which Hastert has denied.  Reynolds has paid over $21,000 in legal fees from his campaign account.

One figure from the scandal shows no legal fees being paid from his campaign war chest: former House Page Board Chairman Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., who the House Ethics Committee blasted for failing to properly investigate early warnings about Foley.

The Congressman in charge of child pornography is a Gay man making passes at Congressional Pages. The Department of Justice has been turned into a political arm of the Republican Party – firing its own appointees for not towing the line. The C.I.A. is marginalized in favor of a Neoconservative Zealot – Douglas Feith. Our Ambassador to the U.N., John Bolton, opposes the existence of the U.N. Our President lies to get us into a misbegoten war. The Vice President is an Oil Executive on the take. And the central operative is a Sociopath expert in dirty politics. And we know we’re not even close to the bottom of this cesspool. So why remember Foley? Because he’s part of the weighty evidence that we have a government that operates like the ones we used to make fun of as corrupt "Banana Republics."