Zack Stanton was a House page from 2001–2002. You can find him on Twitter at @zackstanton.

In the middle of October I was sitting on my couch in Washington and heard a familiar name come up on CNN: Dennis Hastert. “Prosecutors have charged Hastert with lying to the FBI about $3.5 million he agreed to pay to… a former student to keep quiet about allegations of sexual abuse dating back to Hastert's time as a high school teacher.” On October 28, after striking a deal with prosecutors, the former speaker of the House pleaded guilty.

This was nine years after the FBI had barged into my parents’ house, more than a decade after the unsettling things I’d seen on Capitol Hill. It was the final thud of a decline that had reshaped Congress—and in which I’d played a pivotal role that almost nobody except those FBI agents knew.


Hastert’s speakership had ended in both defeat and scandal. In November 2006, after Democrats retook the house, Hastert announced he'd step down from leadership in the next Congress. He didn’t have much choice in the matter. That fall, a story exploded that likely cost Republicans their House and Senate majority: Florida Republican Rep. Mark Foley, it was revealed, had repeatedly made sexual advances to several congressional pages. Hastert, the speaker at the time, had allegedly been told by House colleagues about Foley’s history of messaging teens, and did nothing.

I was a congressional page in 2001 and 2002. During that year, Foley sent sexual instant messages to at least three of my classmates. The messages weren’t flirtatious—though some started that way—but out and out lewd. Two of those recipients continued to receive them well after their time in the page program had elapsed, extending into our college years. Many of us who were pages at the time knew that the conversations had taken place. Some of us even shared copies of the message logs among ourselves. But how the conversations went public, and who gave them to reporters and started the avalanche that ended Foley’s career and dealt a blow to the Republican congressional majority, has never come out.

It was me.

I didn’t do it to sink the Republicans, though as an aspiring Democratic politico, I wasn’t sorry to see it happen. I did it because I realized just how easily Rep. Foley had been evading accountability for repeat offenses, and that the House leadership was either unwilling or unable to solve the problem. I had no idea what I’d eventually learn about the speaker in whose hands the problem was placed.

In 2006, it seemed clear the House leadership knew something inappropriate was happening with Foley and the pages; Hastert’s disgraceful exit from the speakership that year reflected this suspicion-by-consensus. But knowing what I now know, it’s chilling to realize that the speaker of the House had, decades earlier, allegedly sexually abused a teenage boy while working as a high school wrestling coach. What if Hastert’s neglect was not simply incompetence, but choice?

***

For decades on Capitol Hill, it was impossible to miss the pages. They’re teenagers, fresh-faced, pimple-pocked and famously dressed alike—navy blue blazers, charcoal gray pants, white dress shirts, and a thick blue-and-red-striped polyester tie that conjures images of flight attendants on a discount airline in the Reagan era. To others on the Hill, the uniforms act as a marker for quick identification. Within the program, they functioned as something of an equalizer, a reminder that in spite of our differences—children of wealthy scions and immigrants, red-meat conservatives and fire-breathing liberals—there was a oneness; we belonged.

In this June 2006 photo, House pages line up to shake hands with Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert in the Capitol Rotunda. The Foley scandal exploded less than four months later. | Getty

I knew I wanted to be a page since literally the first time I heard of it, right around the time that my seventh-grade love of professional wrestling gave way to an eighth-grade love of politics—I had to get into the page program. I volunteered long hours with my congressman for years to make it a reality. In August 2001, weeks before my junior year of high school, the acceptance letter came in a thick envelope from House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt. I had been granted admission to my own personal Hogwarts.

Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., in a July 2003 photo. Foley engaged in sexually explicit instant message exchanges with multiple House pages, a revelation that helped Republicans lose their congressional majority in 2006. | AP Photo

During Labor Day weekend, my parents and I joined a block-long line of 70 incoming pages and their doting parents for move-in day. We were all living away from home for the first time, housed in a dorm that often took on a summer-camp atmosphere. We were adolescents, subject to the same teenage romances and cliques as all high schoolers, only ours played out in the halls of Congress.

That first week was a blur—the need to familiarize yourself with the Capitol, to make sense of the House office building system, the Morse code-like bell system and corresponding row of tiny lightbulbs found on every clock on the Hill, the cramped labyrinth of hallways in the basement, the underground tunnel system. We began memorizing the names and faces of every member of the House, using a stack of hundreds of glossy photos as flashcards.

The second week I remember more clearly: Tuesday, September 11. As our school got out, I made my way to the elevator and noticed a group of pages huddled around the school secretary’s desk. A classmate scurried up to me. “Planes ran into the World Trade Center,” he said. I thought he was lying.

A dozen of us squeezed into the Democratic cloakroom, huddling around the small, 10-inch TV. As we learned the news—two planes in New York, a plane that hit the Pentagon, one plane still unaccounted for—we also heard the terrifying false alarms: reports of a bomb detonated at the State Department, that the National Mall was on fire. Soon, a decision was made: we have to get out of here.

Just then, a deafening alarm clanged to life in the Capitol building. I assumed the same as everyone else: a plane was about to hit the Capitol. We started sprinting. Police officers made a mad dash for the exits. Outside, there was chaos. Entire congressional offices pouring out into the streets. Smoke plumed from the Pentagon plane crash two miles away.

New Window OPTICS: A History of the House Page Program | Click here to view a pictorial history of the federal government's youngest officials.

Back at the dorm, penned inside the communal living room until they could get a head count, we gathered and cried. We watched CNN as the footage looped, a Mobius strip of grief, confusion and horror. We were out of Kleenex, so a spare roll of toilet paper passed around, many of us ripping off a few squares in a futile effort to blot our tears and stem the flow.

That was our introduction to Washington, D.C. We were 16-year-olds, alone and in the middle of it all. Our families were back home, and in their absence, we became a family, with all of the affection, arguments, favoritism, comfort and drama that families entail. Looking back, I realize just how vulnerable we all were.

***

When the House was in session, members of Congress interacted constantly with pages. When they needed to get something back to their district office right away, we’d be dispatched to deliver it, post haste. When a VIP called—Senator Kennedy, Senator Clinton, the White House—we would answer the call and leave to find congressman so-and-so in the throng of 400 people on the House floor. When the House was in session, we had to be there, too. If they started early in the morning, we’d end our school day early enough to be on the floor before they arrived. If there was a big vote and they stayed late into the night, we were there until they finished.

Working in Congress, you quickly realize how much it’s like any other office. There are the charming, warm-and-friendly types—J.C. Watts, who knew people by name, or Loretta Sanchez, who had an easy comfort with pages—and the confrontational types, like Jesse Jackson, Jr., who once accused a page of stealing a large pizza he had ordered and hiding it in the cloakroom.

Foley was the former. Glossy, every detail of his appearance immaculate and manicured, Foley kept in good shape and wore tailored suits. His skin was richly tanned, like the soft leather upholstery on a private jet, and he had an easy demeanor about him, a magnetic friendliness that made it seem like he really cared about you. On the Hill, Foley was known as something of a publicity hog, the guy who bragged about showing celebrities like Julia Roberts and Melanie Griffith around the Capitol, never one to miss a good photo op. His attraction to celebrity was so apparent and distinct that California Rep. Mary Bono—one to know—nicknamed him “Hollywood.”

Most of the members paid no attention to the pages, but there were those who were friendly, who made an effort to get to know “the help.” Mark Foley was one of them. At the end of the page year, he spoke movingly about our class on the House floor. He seemed to have a personal anecdote to share about each and every single page. Foley’s quick smile and easy small talk were disarming, which may be why it took so long for anyone to notice that he was on the prowl.

An ugly smear campaign? I knew that was a lie. And I knew that there was incontrovertible proof. These emails were nothing.

Early in the page year, Foley started chatting with a few of my classmates on AOL Instant Messenger. AIM was an evolutionary ancestor to the later era of social media and texting, a place where you could instantly talk with friends or strangers while hidden behind a screenname. Like text messages, AIM felt ephemeral—which probably explained its appeal to Foley. But unbeknownst to most users, the program automatically logged full transcripts of every conversation. It had a permanent memory. If you ended a conversation, a verbatim copy of it would, by default, be saved on your computer.

I first heard about the conversations shortly after Foley initiated them. One of the pages Foley had messaged told me and a few classmates about it. We treated the messages like standard-issue, salacious high school gossip: inappropriate, sure, but nothing too out of the ordinary. When you’re 16, you think of yourself as far older and more mature than you really are—especially when your daily routine involves a full-time job on the floor of the House of Representatives. You don’t feel like a kid, and the adults around don’t entirely treat you like one. It doesn’t necessarily seem far-fetched that an adult would be interested in you.

Many of my classmates—myself included—knew that transcripts existed. In 2003, they were passed around between several of us—Can you believe he said this? This is crazy! I had the transcripts in 2003, read a few of the literally dozens of them, got uncomfortable, and deleted them. Over the next several years, as the conversations with Foley continued and the inappropriateness of his conduct deepened, the digital transcripts were shared again. In our class, if you hadn’t read them, you had at least likely heard whispers of their existence.

By 2006, I hadn’t seen the transcripts in three years. They had dropped out of mind. Then something happened to jumpstart my memory.



***

On September 28, 2006, I read a news story that changed my life.

It was a Thursday in early autumn in East Lansing, Michigan, one month into my senior year at Michigan State University. That year, I lived in Emmons Hall, a squat brick-and-glass dormitory from the 1960s, pinned between two busy roads and the gurgling Red Cedar River.

I sat in a standard-issue wooden desk chair, clicking aimlessly on my computer while guzzling another in a long line of Diet Coke cans. On the ABC News website, a headline grabbed my attention: a 16-year-old House page had received vaguely inappropriate emails from Rep. Mark Foley.

The author, top left, with his page class throughout the 2001-2002 semester. “When I visit the Capitol, I get the feeling people do when they walk the halls of his old high school,” writes Stanton. “The capitol, in that sense, is haunted.” | Photos courtesy of Zack Stanton

The article walked a delicate line between reporting what the emails said, and what they meant. Foley’s tone in the emails read like that of a lecherous uncle. He used ellipsis points in place of actual punctuation, as if leaving out the things he really wanted to say:

“I am in North Carolina..and it was 100 in New Orleans...wow that’s really hot...well do you miss DC...Its raining here but 68 degrees so who can argue..did you have fun at your conference….what do you want for your birthday coming up...what stuff do you like to do” [sic]

A later email from Foley got somewhat less vague:

“how are you weathering the storm....are you safe….send me an email pic of you as well….” [sic]

Foley had given himself room to deny wrongdoing if the emails were ever found. When questioned about asking for a photo of the teenage boy, his office explained that it was their policy to keep file photos of former interns and pages so they could more easily recall them if asked to write letters of recommendation. Foley’s emails, his chief of staff maintained, were simply politics, part of an “ugly smear campaign.”

It was like a thunderclap.

Somehow, I had never imagined that Foley’s behavior was part of a pattern, a predatory approach, year after year, class after class, teenager after teenager; he got older, they stayed the same age. An ugly smear campaign? I knew that was a lie. And I knew that there was incontrovertible proof.

These emails were nothing. You can explain your way out of the creepiness of asking a teenager for his age and photo. You cannot juke away from what I’d seen. The transcripts we traded were totally different—full of explicit references to masturbation and penis size and attempts to arrange a real-life rendezvous.

I emailed a classmate who still had copies of the transcripts and asked if he could send them to me. He agreed, on the condition that I not send them to the press. I lied and said I wouldn’t, and encouraged him to send the transcripts himself to ABC News. Within an hour, he emailed me the entire batch—dozens of them.

At this point, I called my old page friend Rafael*, then a student at Columbia University. Rafael had known about our classmates’ conversations with Foley, and remembered it all well. I trusted Rafael's judgment, and wanted his opinion on all of this. Should I send the transcripts? What’s the right thing to do? “It’s a lot of power,” he said. We talked it out and convinced ourselves that I had no real choice, that I had an obligation to give the transcripts to the media—provided that I could protect the anonymity of our classmates.

I looked up the ABC News’ email tip line. Now that I had the transcripts, I would drop a note to its reporters: there was far more to the Foley story—he had sexual conversations with my classmates, and I had transcripts to prove it all.

It didn’t take long before Maddy Sauer, one of ABC’s two reporters working on the Foley case, emailed me back. We exchanged messages.

Maddy Sauer, ABC News, 6:10 PM: I received your email in response to our article on the blotter on Rep. Foley. Please feel free to email me or call me…

Zack Stanton, 6:25 PM: Maddy, As I wrote in the tip, I was a House Page (Democratic) from Sept. 2001 - Jan. 2002. Another page at the time… was getting hit upon by Rep. Foley — both during and after the program (up until 2003, at least). I have some transcripts of various sexually explicit instant-messaging conversations between Joshua* and Foley that took place over that course of time … As you surely know, anonymity is essential for Joshua, who does not (to my knowledge) want the story to get out because of any possible retribution career-wise. …

Maddy Sauer, ABC News, 6:35 PM: Dear Zack, I understand Joshua's concerns. … If you'd like, you can forward me the exchanges with the identities blacked out (as we did on our website) or I can black them out on this end per your instructions. Regardless, I would like to speak with you about the emails before we report anything.

Thursday night, I talked with Maddy on the phone, and walked her through all the information I had, soon sending over several transcripts for her perusal. “They obviously need extensive editing [before you post them online],” I told her in an email, “what with people's real names and screen names mentioned.”



***

The next day, a Friday afternoon, I told my family about the transcripts. I was already with my parents to visit my two younger brothers, who had just started their freshman years at the University of Michigan. Around 3 p.m., I was in my brother’s dorm room when I felt my phone buzz to life in my pocket. I dashed into a stairwell for privacy.

“Hey Zack, it's Maddy from ABC News. We went to Congressman Foley's office with the transcripts you gave us. He resigned. You should be proud of yourself!”

An hour later, the aide called and told her that Foley was going to step down. An hour or so after that, it blew up on the national news. What the hell had I gotten myself into?

ABC News had no way to verify the transcripts’ legitimacy, so Maddy had called Foley’s press secretary and read him excerpts over the phone. After a long pause, Sauer asked if these were, in fact, Foley’s words. He said he’d get back to her.

An hour later, the aide called and told her that Foley was going to step down. Not long after, Foley sent letters of resignation to House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Florida Governor Jeb Bush. An hour or so after that, it blew up on the national news.

I didn’t feel pride so much as excitement, adrenaline and butterflies. I felt like I was floating.

That evening we drove back home to the Detroit suburbs, and I passed the hour-and-change ride clinging to a live radio feed of CNN, where coverage of Foley big-footed a major pre-release exclusive from Bob Woodward’s latest book. What the hell had I gotten myself into?

Until that moment, I had never imagined how huge the story would become. Foley’s was far from the first page sex scandal, and the past scandals had caused ripples, but never waves. In 1983, Reps. Gerry Studds and Dan Crane were reprimanded by the House, censured but not expelled, after an investigation found that they had repeatedly had sex with pages over the previous decade. Unlike the Studds and Crane affairs, the conversations that comprised the Foley scandal were never physically consummated. Surely the publicity surrounding this scandal would be similar to its predecessors.

I was wrong. Something made the Foley ordeal different: It was the first electoral political scandal of the digital age, the first one that would have been impossible to expose if not for the Internet. The media sensation, I suspect, derived from the revelatory way in which the digital paper trail incontrovertibly condemned the guilty (something relatively new to American politics), and how damning and explicit the transcripts were—plain evidence of a congressman acting out many parents’ worst worries about their kids’ use of the internet.

Digital interactions that seem ephemeral are anything but, and the online and offhand become undeniable written records with swift ease. By now, we’re used to it—from the lewd crotch shots that Rep. Anthony Weiner “privately” sent to random women on Twitter, to Gen. David Petraeus’s attempts to use a webmail “saved drafts” folder to hide communications with his mistress—but at the time, it was entirely novel. The undeniable proof would live forever, well beyond a politician’s control. Just as it has changed everything else in the modern world, digital technology has disrupted the way political scandals unfold.

The full transcripts, which ABC News posted online, Friday, September 29, allowed visitors to read more than just the few lascivious excerpts that TV outlets had already reported.

Teen: my last gf and i broke up a few weeks ago

Congressman Foley: are you

Congressman Foley (7:47:11 PM): good so your getting horny

Congressman Foley (7:48:00 PM): did you spank it this weekend yourself

…

Congressman Foley (7:55:02 PM): completely naked?

…

Congressman Foley (7:55:21 PM): very nice

Congressman Foley (7:55:51 PM): cute butt bouncing in the air

Congressman Foley (7:59:48 PM): is your little guy limp...or growing

Congressman Foley (8:01:21 PM): i am hard as a rock..so tell me when your reaches rock

…

Congressman Foley (8:03:47 PM): what you wearin

Teen (8:04:04 PM): normal clothes

Teen (8:04:09 PM): tshirt and shorts

Congressman Foley (8:04:17 PM): um so a big bulge?

Congressman Foley (8:04:58 PM): love to slip them off of you

Congressman Foley (8:05:53 PM): and gram the one eyed snake

Congressman Foley (8:06:13 PM): grab

Congressman Foley (8:08:31 PM): get a ruler and measure it for me



Congressman Foley (8:10:40 PM): take it out

Teen (8:10:54 PM): brb...my mom is yelling

Congressman Foley (8:11:06 PM): ok

Teen (8:14:02 PM): back

Congressman Foley (8:14:37 PM): cool hope se didnt see any thing

Teen (8:14:54 PM): no no

Congressman Foley (8:15:04 PM): good

Teen (8:16:53 PM): well i better go finish my hw...i just found out from a friend that i have to finish reading and notating a book for AP english

In the transcripts, readers saw Foley’s AIM screenname, MAF54. The identities of the teenage recipients of these messages were redacted, their screennames either blacked out or replaced with a placeholder like “Teen.”

Except that ABC News missed a spot.

In the middle of one transcript, the ABC Web team—and not Maddy, to my knowledge—forgot to black out a screenname. The mistake was online for just a few hours on Friday, but by Wednesday, when the Drudge Report deployed its familiar sirens to report that a right-wing blog had released the identity of the page (Drudge himself stopped short of naming him), the damage was already done. Once the recipient’s screenname was available, it was an easy path to look up the actual person behind the digital account. Just like that, Joshua was outed, his life derailed, condemned to a life of search results tying him to an older man’s sexual advances when he was just a kid. Nine years later, it’s still the case that when you enter his name on Google, the top result is the Foley scandal. It will probably be that way for the rest of his life. He’ll never be able to exercise a right to be forgotten, even as he tries to forget.

I ached when I heard that Joshua’s identity had been exposed. He was my friend and classmate, a lovely person. He seemed destined for big things—the type of guy you could easily imagine as a congressman or senator. But no more. Thanks to a single Web post and the din of the partisan blogosphere, it was all undone.

It’s impossible for me to escape the feeling that it was my fault. Certainly the mistake was by ABC News, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the blame rests with them. It’s something I hold on to and struggle with. I’ll note to myself that even in my first email to ABC, I emphasized that protecting his anonymity was of paramount importance; I’ll remember that as soon as I found out, I cut off my interactions with ABC News and I was so frustrated that it fumbled Joshua’s identity that I gave the full transcripts to a family friend, an excellent reporter with the Washington Post. Now that the Post had the transcripts, it would break ABC’s exclusive claim to the story’s source material. I’ll point to all of these actions, noting that my concern for Joshua was there from Day One.

I emailed my professors with the most ridiculous ‘I’m gonna miss class’ excuse ever. Then I waited for the FBI to arrive.

But what consolation is that to him? Harm, even if unintended, doesn’t hurt any less. He and I both have an albatross in this way. For him, it’s the scandal itself that will follow him in public through adulthood. For me, it’s the guilt that I may have ruined his life.



***

On Sunday, October 1, two days after Foley resigned, House Speaker Dennis Hastert sent a letter to the attorney general’s office requesting an investigation into Foley’s conduct. Hastert also requested that the investigation broaden its scope beyond Foley: “[T]here should be an investigation into the extent there are persons who knew or had possession of these messages but did not report them. … It is important to know who may have had the communications and why they were not given to prosecutors before now.”

That evening, I emailed Maddy Sauer.

Zack, 8:09 PM: “Do I have anything to worry about?”

Maddy, 8:32 PM: “I would not be surprised if you and many other pages are contacted for questioning, but I cannot imagine the House is looking to blame the pages for this. That would be a ridiculous thing for them to do politically.”

I wasn’t taking any chances; I knew of plenty of scandals in which the messenger or victim, not the responsible parties, became the target of attacks. On the evening of October 4, I cold-called the FBI and left a message with the hotline operator explaining who I was, what I knew, and where to contact me. She said they would be in touch.

The next morning, news broke that Joshua, his identity now public knowledge, had hired Stephen Jones. Jones was a high-profile trial attorney, best known for representing Timothy McVeigh during his prosecution for the Oklahoma City bombing. Through mutual friends, I learned that Joshua was searching out whoever gave the transcripts to the media, and wanted to sue for defamation.

That afternoon, my dad called to tell me that FBI agents had paid a visit to our family home, and that they had asked him to tell me to stay in my dorm room until they got to my campus. I emailed the professors for my afternoon classes and gave them what probably sounded like the most ridiculous “I’m gonna miss class” excuse ever. Then I waited for the FBI to arrive.

After four hours, my cell-phone rang. It was Kent Vandersteen, an FBI agent based out of the bureau’s East Lansing office. Vandersteen had a commanding voice, and asked if I’d be willing to come in and talk with him the next day. Remembering Hastert’s words—“any and all individuals who may have been aware”—I accepted, trying to be as accommodating to the FBI as possible. I offered to let him choose a time to meet, and he suggested 7 a.m. on Friday.

In the aftermath of the Foley leak, House Republican leadership scrambled to avoid the fallout. Senior leaders, including then-Majority Leader John Boehner, right, said they had warned Hastert earlier of Foley's behavior, a claim that Hastert, left, denied. | Getty

That morning, I woke up around 5, showered, dressed—how does one dress for an FBI interview?—and started my walk across campus. Sunrise wasn’t for another hour or so, and the sky was peach and purple in anticipation. I came to a bland suburban office park. I had imagined the FBI’s digs as sleek and somewhat foreboding, lots of glass and brushed steel and high tech gadgets—a perception undoubtedly influenced by generations of spy movies. In reality, the office was another cubicle-filled workplace. Kent’s office had a wooden desk, reclining office chair, and standing shelves filled with books, family photos, and other personal tchotchkes. I admit to being thrown off by one item in particular: a navy blue “Bush/Cheney” rally sign. The Foley scandal is a political disaster for Republicans, I thought. Is he going to hold that against me?

But Agent Vandersteen was profoundly decent and professional. He had the firm, reliable demeanor of a conservative dad whose kids play hockey. His questions were thorough—Who are the people involved? Why’d you give the transcripts to the news media? What don’t we know that we should?—and during the course of our conversation, it became clear that the FBI was just trying to figure out what had happened with Foley, that I wasn’t at risk, nor were any pages who would cooperate with the investigation.

We spoke for almost three hours. He Xeroxed my page yearbook, gave me his business card, and told me to call him if I ever needed anything or if anything new came up.

***

Over the course of days and weeks, the scandal grew in intensity. It seemed implausible that nobody on Capitol Hill knew about Foley’s behavior. The questions veered to who knew what and when.

On the day Foley resigned, the House responded by unanimously passing a resolution to investigate the ordeal. The following day, the political fallout began to spread. Republican Rep. Tom Reynolds said that he had known about Foley’s creepy emails to a former page back in 2005, and claimed he told Hastert about it as soon as he knew. Likewise, Rep. John Shimkus, head of the House Page Board, knew in late 2005, and claimed to have investigated the case, reassured by Foley that the emails were innocent. House Majority Leader John Boehner was told in spring 2006, and claimed to have immediately informed Speaker Hastert.

Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi fired off a stern statement: “The fact that Mr. Foley was engaging in this behavior with underage children, that the Republican Leadership knew about it for six months to a year and has characterized the inappropriate behavior as ‘overly friendly’ and ‘acting as a mentor,’ and that apparently no action was taken to protect these underage children is abhorrent.”

Those facts fueled the growing chorus calling for Hastert’s resignation as speaker. Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn said, “If anybody participated in a cover-up, whether it was a member or whether it was a staffer or whether it was somebody who was holding emails, that individual needs to resign immediately.” The reliably conservative Washington Times minced no words in its own editorial on the topic, titled “Resign, Mr. Speaker.” “Either [Hastert] was grossly negligent for not taking the red flags fully into account and ordering a swift investigation … or he deliberately looked the other way,” their op-ed read. “Mr. Hastert has forfeited the confidence of the public and his party, and he cannot preside over the necessary coming investigation, an investigation that must examine his own inept performance.”

On an October 4 CNN panel, James Carville predicted that Hastert would resign by the week’s end. Bay Buchanan, his conservative counterpart on the panel, said he should resign by the end of the day.

Democrats had already stood a good chance at retaking the House, and the Senate was close, but within reach. Now, because of the Foley and Hastert maelstrom, it seemed like a foregone conclusion. Newsweek devoted a cover to the Foley scandal, its subhead declaring that the brouhaha “could cost Bush Congress.” It was a cover story for TIME, too, with a close-up of an elephant’s posterior alongside a small, sober headline saying that the scandal “may well spell the end of the Republican revolution.”



***

On the morning of October 7, a long-lost page classmate called me on the phone. We chatted for about two hours, catching up on things, and then he turned serious.

The Foley scandal made national headlines, fueling speculation that the Republican majority might soon come to an end. | TIME, Newsweek

After the page program, he had stayed in Washington as a summer intern. During this time, he said, a member of Congress who had always been friendly to pages invited him to a party at his apartment. “You really need to be there,” the representative insisted.

On the night of the party, my classmate darted through the rain and strode up the steps to the front door. The congressman greeted him and welcomed him inside, taking his wet jacket while he dried off. It was quiet, he noticed. Walking into the living room, he realized why: nobody was there.

Unsure what exactly to do, he sat down on the couch. The congressman, he said, sat down next to him. He scooted down the couch to get a bit more space. The congressman followed, matching him move for move. It was then, he said, that the congressman laid his hand on his inner thigh, groping him. My classmate claimed to have made up an excuse, stood up and bolted out of the apartment, running out into the rain.

As he told me everything, I was repulsed. But I also wondered why he would tell this all to me. We weren’t particularly close. We hadn’t talked in years. Was he simply confiding this news in someone he thought he could trust? Or was he telling me this information because he was a Republican and hoped to find out that I was the source on the Foley story? It was hard to tell. Not wanting to out myself, I told him that I had family friends who worked at the Post, and if he wanted to talk to them about his story, I could connect them. He declined. The conversation ended, and we haven’t spoken since.

If he’d been fishing with a baited hook, others were fishing with spears. Everyone wanted to know—fellow pages, media sources, Joshua and his lawyer, and a gaggle of hyperpartisan bloggers and their legions of commenters. Shortly after bloggers outed Joshua as the one who had had the conversations with Foley, they turned their hive mind to figuring out who was behind the revelations.

Having looked at the roster of the pages who served during our semester, commenters found that only about one in four served the House Democrats. Clearly, they reasoned, it had to be one of them. I had been active on a page alumni message board online, which was seemingly all the proof they needed that I had been involved. One commenter held forth on a right-wing blog:

if [Zack] thinks that we believe for one second that he didn't turn those over to a democrat operative, almost as soon as they [hit] his little red hand, he must be a crazy little bugger. ... He's been on my radar for a week, and I have a little more on him, that I won't put up here. ...There is MUCH more to this story, yet to come. Much that Mme. Pelosi et al. will not be happy to see in print.

It was around this time that I started getting phone calls to my dorm room in the middle of the night. I’d answer, and the person on the line would say nothing, just breathe normally, as if to let me know that he was on to me, that I was being watched. After the second or third call in as many days, I yanked the phone jack from its socket. I was beginning to get paranoid.



***

As Election Day 2006 neared, the pressure was simply becoming to be too much to bear. I needed to get away, so I decided to travel to New York to visit my old friend Rafael at Columbia University.

But less than two minutes after landing at LaGuardia, my phone rang. It was a 202 area code. A team of attorneys with the House Ethics Committee was calling to ask if I would mind answering some questions.

Above, Rahm Emanuel, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer celebrate on Election Night 2006. The Democrats narrowly retook majority control of both chambers of Congress. In a poll, 74 percent of voters identified “corruption and scandals” as either “very important” or “extremely important” factors in their votes. | AP Photo

They had an ultimatum: You can willingly participate and answer a few questions for us during a phone call later this week, and your identity will stay private. Or you can choose not to comply, in which case, we’ll subpoena you, and your name will be a matter of public record. I chose the former, and agreed to talk to them on the coming Thursday.

That night, I watched from Rafael's dorm room as election results came in. Democrats retook the House by a large margin, and the Senate by a smaller one. In exit polls, 74 percent of voters named “corruption and scandals in government” as either “very important” or “extremely important” factors in their votes.

The next morning, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resigned, and Dennis Hastert announced he’d step down from GOP leadership.



***

A day later, I had a phone call with House Ethics committee lawyers. As the call began, I paced around the communal living area outside of Rafael's dorm room. It suddenly occurred to me that some of these attorneys were out of a job because of the change in control of the House.

I answered their questions one by one. The attorneys were polite and professional, asking extensively about how I got the transcripts, why and how I leaked them, the basic facts and timeline of the case. I told them everything they wanted to know, and some things they didn’t want, either.

I mentioned the rumor about the other member of Congress—the story my long-lost classmate had told me. The ruse about the intern party, the empty apartment, the groping. I told them the name of the page who shared this with me, and the name of the member of Congress he spoke about.

After I finished, there was a long pause. Finally, an attorney cleared his throat. “Well,” he sputtered, “we’re really just focused on Congressman Foley here.”

Four weeks later, on December 8, 2006, the House Ethics Committee released its 91-page report on the Foley affair, a compelling account detailing those who knew that something was amiss—not necessarily something sexual, but something—with the way Foley interacted with pages. The report makes note of a late-night incident before 2000, when Foley, drunk, tried to enter the page dorm before being turned away by the U.S. Capitol Police officers who guard it. Staffers who worked intensively with the page program later told investigators that they got a “creepy feeling” from Foley.

More importantly, the report detailed the political concerns that colored the actions of elected officials who were aware of wrongdoing.

The ethics report stated that Rep. Rodney Alexander was first contacted by a reporter on the “creepy emails” story in spring 2006. Alexander told this to Rep. Tom Reynolds, then chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and John Boehner, then majority leader, both of whom thanked him for the information and said that they’d handle it.

Boehner claimed that within the hour, he approached Hastert on the House floor and told him about the emails. Boehner testified that Hastert assured him that he’d already taken care of it. “More than a day” after Alexander told him about Foley’s emails, the NRCC’s Reynolds claimed also to have spoken with Hastert. In both cases, Hastert testified that he had no recollection of such discussions.

In depicting a culture of soft-pedaling and discretion, the report made a vivid case for major congressional reform. It condemned the “disconcerting unwillingness to take responsibility for resolving issues regarding Rep. Foley's conduct.” Yet the report did not recommend a single disciplinary action for any of the people involved—no staffer, no congressperson, no accountability at all.

It is impossible not to notice that Hastert, a man once universally seen as above reproach, seemed to deny any advance knowledge about Foley’s predatory behavior toward teenage boys. And it is now impossible for me to believe his testimony to the Ethics Committee—testimony that goes against what others told investigators—knowing that Hastert covered up his own decades-old sexual relationship with a boy, which began when Hastert was a high school wrestling coach. That boy was a teenager, a high schooler. He could have just as easily been a page.

Left, Hastert is led into the federal courthouse in Chicago in June 2015 to plead guilty in a case that involved violating banking law and lying to FBI investigators over an allegation of sexual abuse during Hastert's time as a high school wrestling coach. At right, Hastert, top left, observes a wrestling clinic. | AP Photos

Ultimately, aside from Mark Foley, only one entity was held responsible and punished for the Foley scandal: the page program itself.



***

On August 8, 2011, Speaker Boehner and Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter to all members of Congress. “Changes in technology have obviated the need for most Page services,” they wrote. “We have jointly directed the Clerk of the House and other House officials to take the steps necessary to conclude the Page Program by August 31, 2011.”

I was stunned. The page program was a tradition more than two centuries old, one that withstood the Civil War, Great Depression and plenty of scandals. It would end in three weeks. In a way, the letter’s statement that “the program’s high costs are difficult to justify” was right—though the cost that concerned them wasn’t monetary; it was political. After all, the Senate program was not discontinued—it lives on to this day. But for House leadership, the risk of another scandal was simply too great.

A few minutes after reading the letter, I sent it out to 60 of my closest friends. They needed to know; it was a death in the family. We shared in our disappointment and shock. “I have a suggested solution,” said one, half-jokingly, “all of us now need to run for Congress, get elected, and relaunch the program. Who is in?” Others suggested a lobbying campaign, or expressed a renewed interest in attending a class reunion.

Ultimately, aside from Mark Foley, only one entity was held responsible and punished for the Foley scandal: the page program itself.

A dozen of us had been planning to meet the following month for a reunion in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, to mark 10 years since the September 11 attacks and pay respects to the passengers of United Flight 93, who, as we now know, literally saved our lives with their heroism. Now, we were compelled to pay our respects to the page program that had brought us together. Nobody else in the outside world quite knows what it was like to be page. In the 14 years since, I’ve begun to appreciate how lasting our bond is, how meaningful and rare.

Nowadays when I visit the Capitol, I get the feeling people do when they walk the halls of his old high school. Every sight triggers a memory. Here’s the place where Barney Frank would sit and read the newspaper while chewing on a cigar. Here’s where Jim Traficant gave me a fist bump. Here’s the stairway I ran down when I thought a plane was about to crash into the building. As a page, I’d wander the empty hallways and feel the ghosts of history swirl around me; now, it’s much the same, except I am one of those ghosts and the history is personal. The Capitol, in that sense, is haunted.

Mark Foley now lives in Florida, where he runs a small business, hosts an occasional radio show and has worked as a lobbyist for the Washington Nationals. Years ago, he was a troubled man, but by all accounts, he’s sought treatment for his demons and I sincerely hope he finds happiness and peace of mind.

Nine years after I helped expose the scandal, I have two big regrets from the whole episode.

The first is that my classmate’s name was ever made public. For that, I am sorry. There aren’t words strong enough to convey my remorse over the suffering he must have felt, and the looming specter of the scandal that may follow him for the rest of his life. Joshua still works in politics. We recently met and talked for the first time in nine years. I apologized; he accepted. We talked for hours about Foley—we were, in a sense, two of only three people at the center of this scandal—and we came out with a renewed friendship.

Two former House pages during a 2011 lobbying campaign to save the page program, which was discontinued the following year. | Getty, Tom Williams/Roll Call

The second regret is that the scandal’s furor may have caused the end of the page program. You’ll notice the absence of the pages when you watch the State of the Union. They were never front and center, but always there if you looked to the margins, the tightly-packed scrum of people right next to the door where the president enters—a tangle of kids with outreached arms hoping for a handshake. It’s a sad reality that Congress chose to eliminate the program, and speaks volumes—it was the actions of the congressmen that merited reform and condemnation, not the actions of pages. If Congress can’t seem to trust itself around teenagers, getting rid of them is simply blaming the victims rather than stopping the perpetrators.

Today, the page program exists only in memory, but the people whose lives it changed go on. It’s part of them, deep in their marrow. They’re strewn about across the world, with professions and lives as varied as you can imagine—a truck driver, a filmmaker, attorneys. A few still work in politics. I did for a while, too, but I’ve since moved on.

I used to think it was the art of politics itself that mattered to me. Politics was my secular religion, a way I made sense of the world. I’ve come to believe that it’s ultimately the things we hold on to that define us—people, places, objects, ideas—each one provoking joy or sadness or laughter or guilt.

For a long time, I held on to politics. I worked on campaigns, ran for local office, even returned to Capitol Hill to work as a speechwriter. Now, I’ve let it go. The page program, or at least my memory of it, I hold on to.

*At the author’s request, Joshua and Rafael are pseudonyms, used here out of respect for privacy.

This story has been updated to correct the timeline of Hastert's resignation.