From Think Progress, we learn the news that Rep. Tom Reynolds plans to retire.  Reynolds was indeed a key player in the scandal surrounding Rep. Mark Foley in the fall of 2006:

Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), a key player in covering up the Mark Foley page scandal, will reportedly announce his retirement today. Reynolds was recently the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which has come “under fire after millions of dollars went missing in an accounting scandal during Reynold’s leadership.”

Today, CREW sent a letter to Speaker Pelosi and Minority Leader Boehner asking that the House leaders start cooperating with law enforcement authorities pursuing legitimate criminal investigations involving members of Congress.  The letter can be found here.

Leaders of the House have been improperly shielding members of Congress – including former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), Rep. William Jefferson (D-LA), Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA) and Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) -- from criminal investigation and prosecution through an expansive and aggressive interpretation of the Speech or Debate Clause of the Constitution.

Members of Congress, like all other citizens, can hire attorneys to ensure that their constitutional rights are protected; this is not, however, the job of the House general counsel, hired at taxpayer expense.

A key excerpt from CREW's letter to Pelosi and Boehner:

Members of Congress are not above the law, but the House's aggressive use of the Speech and Debate Clause to impede law enforcement authorities from investigating members' potentially illegal activities is unseemly.

Unseemly, indeed. 

Former Congressman Mark Foley (R-FL), who resigned last fall amidst a scandal involving House pages, has spent almost $500,000 from his campaign account on legal fees the Palm Beach Post reported today. To date, no criminal charges have been filed against Foley and he is no longer subject to House ethics sanctions because of his resignation:

Former Rep. Mark Foley, who has not been charged with breaking any laws after he sent sexually explicit electronic communications to former House pages, has spent nearly a half million dollars in legal fees this year.

The $483,254 came from leftover campaign funds Foley had accumulated during a dozen years in Congress and in the midst of a tough re-election fight last year.

Foley's campaign finance report filed with the Federal Elections Commission for the quarter ending June 30 indicates he paid $277,367 to the Washington-based Zuckerman Spaeder law firm.

That is on top of the $205,627 in legal fees he paid during the first half of the year.

Foley's legal payments are likely to be even higher because the most recent payment, in June, covered fees only through April.

Although Foley has not been charged, he has been under investigation by federal and state officials to determine whether he violated any laws in his dealings with former House pages, including sending them sexually explicit e-mails and instant messages.

The Washington Blade provides an update on former Rep. Mark Foley.  Criminal charges are apparently under active consideration: 

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 the thing to do, apparently. Get in trouble -- then rely on campaign funds to pay your legal fees -- even after you've left Congress in disgrace. A search through Political Money Line came up with these expenditures by some former members with very familiar names:

The Tom DeLay Congressional Committee reported paying $454,144 for legal services from 10/1 to 12/31. The committee paid $190,000 to Bracewell & Giuliani LLP of Houston, TX. The committee also paid McGahn & Associates $38,441 and McGuire Woods LLP $225,703 for legal services.

The Bob Ney For Congress committee reported paying Vinson & Elkins of Houston, TX, $70,000 for legal services.

Friends of Mark Foley committee reported paying Zuckerman Spaeder LLP of Washington, D.C., $48,141 on 12/15 for legal fees.

DeLay and Ney are going to run out of campaign funds soon.  DeLay has $11, 623 cash on hand as of December 31, 2006 while Ney has just over $36,000.  They can't raise more now that they are out of Congress.  Meanwhile, Foley's committee has $1,677,549 cash on hand as of 12/31/06.  

Another scathing editorial about the FBI's performance in the Foley scandal.   This one from the Miami Herald: 

In refusing last summer to investigate the e-mails that former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley sent to a former congressional page, the FBI ignored its own child-safety guidelines, says a report from the Justice Department's inspector general. The Foley e-mails given to the FBI in July 2006 by a whistle-blower group didn't contain sexually explicit references, but their language indicated behavior that the FBI warns about in A Parent's Guide to Internet Safety on its website. The agency should review how it handles complaints about public officials.

The inspector general took the FBI to task for not reacting quickly to the e-mails, which were given to the agency by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). The report says the FBI also wrongly blamed CREW for not handing over additional information. Never happened, says the report.

While the agency clearly has more-pressing duties in the era of terrorism than tracking congressmen with a penchant for befriending House pages, the FBI dropped the ball.

Another slam at the FBI. This one from The St. Petersburg Times:

...[G}iven the tools at the FBI's disposal, it is unacceptable that the agency would treat the case as a hot potato to be passed from office to office. In the e-mails, Foley asks the boy his age, requests a photo and remarks that another was "in really great shape." Though those initial messages were not sexually explicit and officials concluded there was no sign of a crime at the time, the inspector general reasonably concludes that the FBI should have taken a closer look at Foley's behavior.

The inspector general found that agents bounced the e-mails from office to office as they haggled over who had responsibility for pursuing them. The Fort Pierce Republican abruptly resigned Sept. 29 following reports that he sent explicit instant messages to teenage boys. While the earlier messages may have lacked a smoking gun, they provided, as the inspector general said, "enough troubling indications on their face." At the very least the FBI should have passed its concerns to House managers or congressional watchdog agencies.

The report also noted the FBI misled the public by trying to blame a watchdog group for redacting the e-mails it passed along to the FBI. The inspector general found that the advocacy group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, had not withheld information, and that missing material was not behind the bureau's decision to drop the matter. Whether the culprit was laziness or fear or bureaucrats simply passing the buck, the FBI failed to do its job.

(Coincidentally, this same paper also had the notorious Foley e-mails well before they became public, but failed to report on the story as the Executive Editor explained last October.)

The Washington Post Editorial Board thinks the FBI "fell short" in the Foley scandal. They're right:

...[G]iven that minors were involved, the FBI should have done more. The messages were disturbing enough to the former page that he forwarded them to a congressional staffer with the comment that they were "sick" and "freaked me out." The FBI agents who looked at them concluded, variously, that they were "odd" and "inappropriate"; one who read them remembered thinking, "What a freak."

As the report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine concluded, the e-mails "provided enough troubling indications on their face, particularly given the position of trust and authority that Mr. Foley held with respect to House pages, that a better practice for the FBI would have been to take at least some follow-up steps with regard to the e-mails" -- interviewing the former page, notifying House officials in charge of the page program or at the very least telling the group that had forwarded them to the FBI, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), that it did not plan to take any additional steps. "We are not the ethics police," the agent in charge of the cyber crimes unit told the inspector general. True, but as the report points out, the FBI's own guide to Internet safety points out that predators often "gradually seduce" their targets with attention and gifts.

All too characteristically, when Mr. Foley's misbehavior came to light, the FBI blamed its inaction on incomplete and "heavily redacted" information provided by CREW and the organization's alleged refusal to provide additional details. As the report makes clear, that was not accurate. It was the FBI's apathy, not CREW's recalcitrance, that was at fault here.

ConWebBlog examines the report on CNS about the IG report on how the FBI handled the Mark Foley investigation. LIke the Washington Times article earlier this week, the CNS report largely overlooked the criticism of the FBI's performance:

A Jan. 24 CNSNews.com article by Nathan Burchfiel on the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General report on how the FBI handled the Mark Foley matter took a strangely pro-FBI spin, burying or ignoring mistakes made by the organization. Here's Burchfiel's lead;

The Federal Bureau of Investigation acted "within the range of discretion" in deciding not to investigate sexually charged Internet conversations between former Rep. Mark Foley and a former congressional page, the Justice Department has concluded.

Critics are unhappy, however, and called Tuesday for congressional hearings into the matter.

The article continued on that tack by describing exculpatory findings regarding the FBI. It's not until the 9th paragraph is it hinted that the report contains anything critical about the FBI's handling of the case. The Washington Post, meanwhile, led its article on the report with that criticism -- that the FBI should have taken "some follow-up steps" when it learned about the emails.

Also, similar to the Washington Times article, ConWebBlog notes that CNS failed to mention the finding that the FBI misled the media:

Burchfiel's article, however, offers no mention whatsoever of the report's other major finding -- that anonymous Justice and FBI officials had falsely told the media that the group that first forwarded the Foley emails to the FBI, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW), that the messages supplied by CREW had been "heavily redacted" and that the group had refused to provide further information. In fact, according to the report, the only thing removed from the messages was the identity of the person to whom the communications had been forwarded, and that the "redactions in the e-mail did not factor into the FBI's decision to decline to investigate the matter."

We don't usually include the entire text of articles or editorials on the blog, but today we're making an exception for an editorial in The New York Times:

Mark Foley fled his seat in the House of Representatives last September when his sexual approaches to teenage pages finally reached the news media after years of a shameful cover-up in the halls of Congress. Now it turns out that the F.B.I. was just as phlegmatic about the scandal as Mr. Foley’s Republican colleagues. An inspector general’s report excoriates F.B.I. agents for brushing aside “troubling” evidence of the lawmaker’s flirtatious message-writing, and then falsely blaming their inaction on the watchdog group that tried to alert the government in the first place.

The report underlines the calculated indifference at the heart of the scandal. In their final hours in power, the Republicans who controlled the ethics committee issued a report that whitewashed the fact that key members of the Republican leadership and their staff members were aware of Mr. Foley’s long predatory history. The F.B.I. inspector general’s report showed the same indifference among law enforcement officials charged with investigating Mr. Foley’s actions. The report describes one F.B.I. supervisor who said he had read Mr. Foley’s e-mail notes and thought, “What a freak,” but who had then sent the evidence on a fruitless bureaucratic roundabout.

The lug-headed consensus was that there had been no real crime, when — as the inspector general pointed out — agents should have been urgently alerting the page program’s supervisors.

When the scandal finally became public, the F.B.I. falsely claimed that a watchdog group — Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics — had been uncooperative and withheld vital information. In truth, it had been entirely forthcoming in passing on full details from a former page who had complained about Mr. Foley’s lewd predilections.

The new Congress voted to overhaul protections by mandating that an oversight board of surrogates be enlarged to include a former page and a page’s parent. It will have an even balance of House members to end the majority control that helped bury the Foley scandal. The F.B.I. had better take stock, too, and treat Congress with less wariness.