Opening Remarks

Tom Fitton

President, Judicial Watch

October 18, 2006

The National Press Club

Good afternoon, I'm Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch.   Judicial Watch is non-partisan, educational foundation which advocates high standards of ethics and morality in our nation’s public life.

Today’s panel is entitled “Foley Scandal Fallout – Ethics in Congress.”

It is going to take more than a nuclear bomb going off in North Korea to get the Foley scandal off the front pages. 

By now, you most likely know most of the key details.  Foley is accused of sending salacious emails to male congressional pages - and possibly much worse.  The FBI is investigating.  So, too, is the House Ethics Committee.   And now new federal and ethics investigations have sprung up concerning some alleged weirdness with pages by Congressman Jim Kolbe. 

Speaker Denny Hastert may lose his job and the Republicans may very well lose Congress over the handling of this scandal.

Foley's reported behavior is deplorable and deserves prosecution.  No thinking person could read any of his emails and come to the conclusion they are innocent or appropriate.  Even the supposedly “overly friendly” emails show Foley was attempting to manipulate and seduce the teenagers, who had served as congressional pages.  And the more graphic emails are beyond description.  If Foley’s contacts rise to the level of criminal activity, and it appears they do, then Foley must be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

While Foley is ultimately responsible for his own behavior, it appears some in Congress turned a blind eye to flashing warning signals that something was amiss.  If press reports are to be believed, the leadership in the House of Representatives and other congressmen were warned years ago about Foley's predatory behavior, and they did little to stop it. 

But there is a broader issue than just the Foley scandal.  The fact is, under Hastert's watch, few congressmen accused of ethical misconduct have undergone serious investigations.  To be sure, the Democratic leadership and Hastert were full partners in the evisceration of the ethics process on Capitol Hill.

The ethics process on in the House effectively had ground to a halt.  Gary Condit, Cynthia McKinney, William Jefferson, John Conyers, Tom Delay, Duke Cunningham, Patrick Kennedy, to name a few – all these current or former congressmen are examples of alleged wrongdoers who faced little to no ethics enforcement in the House.  Congressman Foley had good reason to believe he could get away with his behavior - at least with respect to his congressional colleagues.  Foley, for a time, was different from so many of his fellow members who benefited from lackadaisical ethics enforcement.

The criminal investigation of the page scandal will likely never produce any satisfactory public accounting about who knew what and when.  And as for the House Ethics Committee investigation, I do not hold out much hope.  Previous investigations have been half-hearted and politicized and have left many House members unaccountable for egregious misconduct.  I tend to think that not much will change with this investigation, although I hope I'm wrong.  Perhaps public pressure will force more diligence. 

So there is much to discuss here today and we have an excellent panel to take on this topic, which seems to have new developments each day.

Stephen Hess is one of the foremost authorities on media and government in the United States and has been a senior fellow in the Governmental Studies Program of the Brookings Institution since 1972.  He has served on the White House staffs of Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon, and has been an adviser to Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.

Charlie Hurt covers Congress for The Washington Times and has been covering the Foley scandal.  Prior to covering the goings on of Congress and the presidential campaign for the Times, Charlie covered the rise of former Senator John Edwards for folks in North Carolina and the local beat out of Detroit. 

Tim Berger is an investigative Washington correspondent for Time magazine.  He previously worked for the New York Daily News and covered Congress for Roll Call.