Just hours before Congress closed down for the midterm elections on Saturday, Republican leaders threw together a ceremony to celebrate the passage of what they hoped to promote as their singular legislative accomplishment — a bill to bring terrorism suspects to trial.
But after House and Senate leaders formally signed the measure for the cameras, the only questions they faced from assembled reporters pertained to Representative Mark Foley, the Florida Republican who had just resigned after accusations that he sent sexually explicit Internet messages to teenage pages.
“None of us are very happy about it,” Speaker J. Dennis Hastert said before abruptly calling a halt to the questions, and the ceremony.
(snip)
The highly publicized case of Mr. Foley, who served in the House leadership as a deputy whip, threatened to build into an institutional scandal as House leaders acknowledged that they had known about the messages for nearly a year, but had relied on Mr. Foley’s word that nothing inappropriate had occurred.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/washington/01memo.html?hp&ex=1159675200&en=f4ae9ee2fcbdf0ec&ei=5094&partner=homepage