House GOP weighs call for probe into Pelosi and Hoyer’s handling of Massa scandal

Pelosi said last Thursday that she learned of the allegations against Massa on Wednesday, March 3, when he called to say he had been given a cancer diagnosis. She then appeared to refer to the reports of his misconduct when she said her staff had known about the allegations from Hoyer’s staff but had not reported them to her because “every single day there are rumors.”

“I asked my staff, I said, ‘Have there been any rumors about any of this before?’ There had been a rumor, but just that, no formal notification to our office that anything — a one, two, three person removed rumor that had been reported to Mr. Hoyer’s office that had been reported to my staff, which they didn’t report to me, because, you know what? This is rumor city. Every single day there are rumors. I have a job to do and not to be the receiver of rumors,” Pelosi told reporters.

House Republicans are citing two reports – the 2006 investigation of Foley, a Florida Republican, and the just-concluded report on Rangel, a New York Democrat – to argue that Pelosi should have been more involved in dealing with Massa.

Republicans cite the last paragraph of the 89-page Foley report as evidence that members of Congress are required to “pursue specific and non-specific allegations of improper interaction between a member or House employee and a participant in the House Page Program – even if the allegations are not readily verifiable or involve the sensitive subject of a member’s personal relationship with a young person.”

Republicans say that the Rangel report shows that members of Congress are accountable for the actions of their staffers. Rangel was admonished because he accepted trips to the Caribbean that his staff knew were paid for by lobbyist groups.

“Rangel was responsible for the knowledge and actions of his staff in the performance of their official duties,” the ethics report read.

Pelosi’s office has said that its staff was pursuing the allegations against Massa by referring it to the ethics committee. That response would likely, from their perspective, satisfy both conditions set out by the Foley and Rangel reports.

A GOP leadership aide, however, said that merely referring something to the ethics committee does not guarantee any action.

The aide argued that the Foley report language requires a member of Congress to personally confront a lawmaker accused of misconduct. Even Hoyer, who directed Massa’s staff to refer the issue to the ethics committee, fell short of that standard.

A Democratic leadership aide responded that a direct confrontation is the “low bar for action.”

“That was jumped over and went straight to the high bar by contacting ethics immediately, which is the stronger action to take,” the aide said.

“This is very straightforward and simple: with the Foley case, [Republican] leadership knew, didn’t tell anyone, and covered it up,” the aide said. “In this instance, the moment we knew, we acted and took it to ethics. [Massa] was out the door within weeks, and he’s no longer in a position to do anything.”

Massa resigned Tuesday morning, after initially announcing last week that he would not run for re-election due to a cancer scare. By late last week his inappropriate advances toward male staffers had come to light.

By Sunday, Massa had changed his story to say that Democratic leadership was using the ethics allegations to “force him” out of the House as punishment for having voted against Obama’s health-care bill.

By Tuesday, he said he forced himself out, during an hour-long interview with Fox News’ Glenn Beck. He said in that interview that on his 50th birthday, Sept. 16, 2009, he groped and tickled a male aide but that it was not sexual.

“Not only did I grope him, I tickled him until he couldn’t breathe and then four guys jumped on top of me,” Massa said. “It was my 50th birthday. It was ‘kill the old guy.’ You can take anything out of context.”

*This article has been changed to reflect updated information, including comment given by sources who had not responded at the time it was first published.