WASHINGTON — A senior Republican congressional aide said Wednesday that he warned House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's office more than two years ago about "inappropriate behavior" by Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) toward Capitol Hill pages.
That would mean the speaker's office learned about Foley's conduct at least a year earlier than Hastert, an Illinois Republican, has acknowledged.
But a Hastert spokesman challenged the latest assertion in the scandal that has rocked the Republican Party since Foley resigned his House seat Friday, after news reports that he had sent sexually explicit messages to male pages.
Hastert has said that his staff learned of possible problems with Foley's conduct last fall, when a former page lodged a complaint. But with the speaker already under fire over his handling of the case, Wednesday's charge raised more questions about whether Hastert would be forced out of his leadership post.
It also will further fuel criticism that Hastert's office did not move aggressively enough to investigate Foley.
The charge that Hastert's office had been alerted to possible misconduct long before last fall came from Kirk Fordham, Foley's chief of staff for 10 years.
Fordham went to work last year for Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), head of the House Republican campaign committee and part of the GOP's congressional leadership team.
Fordham's link to Foley has raised questions about whether Reynolds and, by extension, Hastert and other House Republican leaders were more aware of questions about Foley than they have claimed to be.
Fordham resigned from Reynolds' staff Wednesday because of the uproar over Foley. In a statement, he said: "The fact is, even prior to the [complaint about Foley lodged last year], I had more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene."
Fordham did not specify when those contacts occurred. But his attorney, Tim Heaphy, told the Los Angeles Times that sometime before Fordham quit Foley's office in early 2004, the aide "received some information about Congressman Foley's inappropriate behavior with pages."
Fordham passed that information along to Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, Heaphy said.
Heaphy said Fordham did not know whether Palmer provided the information to Hastert. But the lawyer said Fordham did know that Palmer met with Foley.
