Oct 13, 2006  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

Two gay former congressional staff members who reportedly knew more than three years ago that then Congressman Mark Foley (R-Fla.) was sending inappropriate e-mails to teenage male pages have promised to cooperate fully in separate investigations into Foley’s actions by the FBI and a House ethics committee.

New details about how Jeff Trandahl, the former clerk of the House of Representatives, and Kirk Fordham, Foley’s former chief of staff, responded to reports of Foley’s overtures to former House pages emerged during the past week.

Trandahl, a member of the board of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s largest gay civil rights group, had the reputation of a strict disciplinarian in his role as head of the House page program, sources familiar with Foley investigation told the Washington Post. The sources, whom the Post did not name, said Trandahl repeatedly urged Fordham to confront Foley about reports of Foley’s inappropriate advances toward male pages, the Post reported.

Fordham has said he did confront Foley. He said he also informed a top aide to Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) about Foley’s inappropriate communication with pages, a development that has prompted congressional Democrats to accuse Hastert and his inner circle of GOP House leaders of a cover-up to safeguard Republican election efforts.

Hastert has said he learned last September of one non-explicit e-mail that Foley sent to a 16-year-old former page, but did not learn of the other, sexually explicit instant messages that led to the scandal until ABC News disclosed them two weeks ago.

Foley resigned from his House seat on Sept. 29 after ABC News published on its web site excerpts of sexually explicit instant messages between Foley and a 17-year-old former House page. The revelations of the instant message exchanges and separate e-mails Foley sent to other male pages triggered an election year scandal that threatens the GOP control of the House.

Gay Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) surfaced as yet another witness to the scandal this week when he disclosed that a former page he had sponsored contacted his office in 2000 or 2001 to complain about e-mails the page received from Foley.

In an Oct. 10 statement, Kolbe said he forwarded the page’s complaint to Foley and Trandahl.

“I was not shown the content of the messages and was not told they were sexually explicit,” Kolbe said. “It was my recommendation that this complaint be passed along to Rep. Foley and the clerk, who supervised the page program,” he said. “This was done promptly.”

Kolbe, who is retiring at the end of this year as the only openly gay Republican in Congress, said he assumed that Foley stopped sending e-mails to the former page. He said he did not raise the issue with Hastert and did not alert the press.

“I believed then, and believe now, that this was the appropriate way to handle this incident given the information I had and the fact that the young man was no longer a page and not subject to the jurisdiction of the program,” Kolbe said.

The Arizona Republic reported that Kolbe has received some criticism for not going public with the information.



Attorney denies pedophilia charge

Gay rights leaders, who have denounced Foley’s interaction with underage pages, expressed concern this week that some conservative Christian groups were attempting to exploit the Foley scandal by seeking to link inappropriate sexual contact between adults and juveniles to homosexuality.

Some activists said Foley’s attorney created confusion over this question last week when he revealed that Foley is gay and that an unnamed clergyman sexually assaulted him as a teenager. The attorney, David Roth, insisted that Foley never had sexual contact with a minor and that any suggestion that Foley was a pedophile “is completely false.”

Less than a week later, the Los Angeles Times reported that a former page came forward to say he and Foley had sexual relations after the page turned 21. The former page, whom the Times did not identify, said Foley had exchanged e-mails and instant messages with him as a teenager several years earlier, shortly after he completed his tenure as a page.

The former page told the newspaper that Foley’s advances toward pages were widely known among current and former pages and that he was surprised it took so long for news about Foley’s behavior to surface in the media.

Although conservative Christian groups like the ...