U.S. Republican congressman involved in underage sexual scandal

The scandal has plenty of political implications for President George W. Bush's Republicans in the November elections, as it puts in jeopardy another Republican seat in the House of Representatives, where Democrats need only 15 to retake control.

FBI spokesman Stephen Kodak said the bureau was conducting an "assessment to determine if there has been any violation of federal law" involving Rep. Mark Foley of Florida who resigned on Friday amid allegations he sent inappropriate messages to young people working at the U.S. Congress.

House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert, Republican of Illinois, who said he was told of the situation some six months before Foley resigned, wrote U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales requesting a Justice Department investigation of Foley's conduct with current and former teens who work for the House as part-time interns, or pages.

Hastert said "since the communications involved interstate communications there should be a complete investigation and prosecution of federal laws that have been violated."

Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada said the attorney general should open a "full scale investigation immediately."

Top House Republicans acknowledged on Saturday they had been aware of e-mail traffic between Foley and a former teen-age page, but that they were not aware of the sexually explicit messages to other pages revealed last week.

The House Ethics Committee has been directed to investigate Foley's actions, and House Republican leaders also called for a criminal investigation into his contacts with pages.

Foley, 52, a six-term Florida Republican, resigned after ABC News reported he sent messages containing references to sexual organs and acts to current and former congressional pages.

House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said House Republican leaders should be questioned under oath on how much they knew of Foley's e-mails to male pages, the teenagers who answer telephones, deliver documents and run other errands for members of Congress.

The scandal, breaking just weeks before the November 7 election to determine control of Congress, has shaken Republicans who often accuse the Democrats of being weak on moral issues.

Foley was chairman of the House caucus on missing and exploited children, and the author of the key sexual predator provisions of the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006, which President George W. Bush signed in July.

Reid in a statement said the allegations against Foley were "repugnant, but equally as bad is the possibility that Republican leaders in the House knew there was a problem and ignored it to preserve a congressional seat this election year."

Democrats and at least one Republican said House Republican leaders should step down if they were aware that Foley was sending inappropriate messages and did nothing about it.

"I think anyone should resign, any leader that knew about this should resign, absolutely," Rep. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, a Democratic contender for the U.S. Senate, said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

Hastert aides said they had been alerted to an exchange between Foley and one congressional page in the fall of 2005 but were not told about any sexually explicit e-mails or text messages, according to a statement issued by the speaker's office.

They said Foley had been warned to stop any such contact and that Hastert did not become aware of the incident until the spring of 2006. Reuters