How the Foley scandal unfolded

Besides ABC News, what other news outlets and watchdog groups knew of the Foley allegations?

Last fall, the St. Petersburg Times and the Miami Herald received copies of Foley's e-mail exchange with the Louisiana boy. Their sources have not been revealed. Both papers looked into the matter, but decided not to publish anything, because no sources would speak on the record and because the e-mails were ambiguous.

Brian Ross of ABC News told The New York Times he received the "overfriendly" Foley e-mails in August, and published a story on Sept. 28, the day before he presented the more explicit exchanges to Foley. The group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, run by former Democratic congressional aides, got copies of Foley's overfriendly e-mails in July, and forwarded them to the FBI, which chose not to act. The website www.stopsexpredators.blogspot.com, run by a blogger who has not revealed his or her identity in public, was also among the first media outlets to post the overfriendly e-mails.

After that initial wave of publicity, it appears that former pages came forward with the more-sexual material.

What is the page program and what problems has it had in the past?

Pages are high school juniors who come from all over the country to work on Capitol Hill as messengers. They live in supervised dormitories and attend a special school for pages. In July 1983, the House Ethics Committee found that Reps. Dan Crane (R) of Illinois and Gerry Studds (D) of Massachusetts had both engaged in sexual relationships with 17-year-old congressional pages – Mr. Crane with a female and Mr. Studds with a male. Both members were reprimanded. Studds went on to win reelection to Congress several times until his retirement. Crane lost reelection in 1984.

How is Hastert continuing to defend himself?

Thursday, the speaker took responsibility for the scandal, but held his ground against pressure to resign.

"I'm deeply sorry this has happened, and the bottom line is we're taking responsibility," Hastert said outside his district office in Batavia, Ill. "Ultimately, the buck stops here."

He also praised the ethics committee's actions and said he would instruct his attorney to cooperate with the panel.

Before Thursday, the speaker had been making the rounds of conservative talk-radio shows, maintaining he had no knowledge of any inappropriate behavior by Foley until last week and blaming the media and Democrats for fanning the flames of scandal.

"The people who want to see this thing blow up are ABC News and a lot of Democratic operatives, people funded by George Soros," Hastert said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune on Wednesday. Mr. Soros is a billionaire benefactor of liberal causes.

But it appears at least one source of information is a Republican. The Thursday edition of the Capitol Hill newspaper The Hill reports: "The source who in July gave news media Rep. Mark Foley's (R-Fla.) suspect e-mails to a former House page says the documents came to him from a House GOP aide. That aide has been a registered Republican since becoming eligible to vote." The Hill reporter writes that the source showed him public records supporting his claim.

Also, some conservatives who had called on Hastert to resign earlier in the week have now backed away from that call, including Paul Weyrich, the founding president of the Heritage Foundation. In a Monitor interview on Tuesday, Mr. Weyrich said he believed Hastert should resign. The next day, he told National Public Radio that he had changed his mind, pending further investigation of the Foley situation.

• Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.

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