Apr 06, 2007  |  By: LOU CHIBBARO J  | COMMENTS     

The Florida Attorney General’s office and the FBI continue to mull over whether to charge former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) with a crime for sending sexually explicit messages to teenage former pages.

Six months after Foley resigned his House seat, Florida’s Child Predator Cybercrime Unit is investigating the disgraced former congressman for possible violation of a state law that prohibits the sexual solicitation or seduction of a juvenile by an adult over the Internet.

A spokesperson for the cyber unit said investigators are looking into online messages that Foley sent to a male teenager and former House page from a hotel room in Pensacola, Fla., where Foley was staying during a trip in 2003.

Foley’s online communication from Florida with at least one former page under age 18 opened the way for Florida authorities to get involved in a probe that began in Washington last October with the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct.

“We are still conducting an active investigation into the matter and continue to work with the Florida Attorney General’s Cypercrime Unit,” said Kristen Perezluha, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

FBI spokesperson Debbie Weirman said the FBI is still conducting its own “preliminary investigation” into Foley’s actions, which it also began last October.

“It’s going on out of our Washington Field Office and we are working together with Florida law enforcement,” Weirman said.

Foley resigned from Congress last Sept. 29 after ABC News published transcripts of sexually explicit instant messages that Foley exchanged with two former House pages, one 16 and the other 17.

News of his improper overtures toward current and former pages and reports that House Republican leaders knew about Foley’s actions but did not take sufficient steps to intervene, triggered a national uproar that some believe helped Democrats win control of Congress in the November elections.

Shortly after his resignation, Foley announced through his attorney that he was gay and had entered an Arizona facility for treatment of “alcoholism and other behavioral problems.” He has since sold his Washington house and returned to Florida where he has remained in seclusion according to reports in the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

At the request of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the Democratic-controlled Congress earlier this year passed legislation that changed the composition of the House Page Board, the body that had been criticized for taking too long to discover Foley’s behavior toward pages.

The legislation, which President Bush signed into law, requires that an equal number of Republicans and Democrats be appointed to the Page Board regardless of which party controls Congress. The legislation also creates two new seats to the board, one for a former page and the other for a parent of a current or former page, and requires the board to meet regularly.

In the six months since Foley’s resignation, three gay men who played a key role in either uncovering Foley’s action toward pages or helped in the investigation have also kept low profiles.

Jeff Trandahl, the openly gay former Clerk of the House of Representatives, whom House investigators say had repeatedly urged staff members of House GOP leaders to rein in Foley’s inappropriate behavior, is now a member of the board of the Human Rights Campaign.

Trandahl, a Republican who had also been involved behind the scenes with the gay group Log Cabin Republicans, now holds the post of executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. Trandahl and his spokesperson, John Butler, a former officer with the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance of Washington, have declined to comment on anything associated with the Foley matter.

Trandahl resigned from his post as House Clerk and announced his new job with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation in the fall of 2005, shortly after Trandahl began questioning Foley’s behavior toward pages in private conversations with both Foley and House GOP staffers. The timing of his departure has raised speculation over whether GOP leaders forced him out of his job.

Trandahl’s friends insist he had been looking for a career change and that he left his job with the House of his own volition, but some Capitol Hill insiders remain skeptical, citing, among other things, an unusually brief and terse announcement on the House floor of his departure as House Clerk.

Information released on the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation web site shows that Trandahl has joined environmental and conservationist leaders to push for ways to protect shoreline habitats as a means of reversing a dramatic decline in fish populations in U.S. territorial waters.

Kirk Fordham, Foley’s chief of staff until 2003, ...