Majority whip slams handling of Foley scandal

A third Republican in the House leadership team publicly distanced himself from the burgeoning scandal over former Rep. Mark Foley yesterday as a top aide resigned amid charges that he tried to suppress the reporting of sexually explicit Internet messages that Mr. Foley had sent a teenage boy.

“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,” Majority Whip Roy Blunt of Missouri said yesterday about his party’s muted handling of “over-friendly” e-mails that Mr. Foley wrote to former congressional pages.

The parents of the 16-year-old boy who received the e-mails alerted congressional Republicans to the messages but said they didn’t want to pursue the matter beyond ordering Mr. Foley to quit contacting their son.

“You absolutely can’t decide not to look into activities because one individual’s parents don’t want you to,” Mr. Blunt said of the decision by top Republicans not to investigate further.

Meanwhile yesterday, the top aide to Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds, the New York Republican who heads the committee responsible for electing Republicans to the House, resigned. Kirk Fordham, a former Foley staffer, said he had volunteered to help Mr. Foley when the scandal broke last week.

In doing so, said ABC News producer Maddy Sauer, Mr. Fordham offered the network a deal that would have kept the messages concealed.

“He said we could have the exclusive on the resignation if we did not run direct quotes from the instant messages,” she said.

The network refused Mr. Fordham’s offer, according to its Web site.

But Mr. Fordham denied wrongdoing, saying yesterday that “at no point did I ever ask anyone to block any inquiries into Foley’s actions or behavior.”

Mr. Fordham also said that more than two years ago, he had “more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene” on concerns over his interactions with male pages.

Those conversations, he said, took place more than a year before the earliest date that the House Republican leadership has acknowledged knowing of any suspicious behavior on Mr. Foley’s part.

Scott Palmer, chief of staff to House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, said yesterday: “What Kirk Fordham said did not happen.”

A second leadership aide said Mr. Fordham is “upset” over leaving his job and “out of his mind.”

Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean said, “This matter has been referred to the standards committee, and we fully expect that the bipartisan panel will do what it needs to do to investigate this matter and protect the integrity of the House.”

Mr. Fordham told ABC News that he plans to contact the FBI today “to tell what he knows.”

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