If I'm not imagining things, I believe these two reports hint that Kolbe may have had a too friendly relationship with pages. From NBC:

Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.) took two male pages with him on a three-day camping trip in 1996, former congressional pages and National Park Service officials have told NBC News.

The pages, who were 17 at the time, went rafting and camping with Kolbe in the Grand Canyon over the July 4th holiday that year.

A spokeswoman for Kolbe confirmed the overnight trip but said that the pages did not travel alone with Kolbe.

And from the Post piece the day before that:

... In interviews with The Post last week, multiple pages identified Kolbe as a close friend and personal confidante who was one of the only members of Congress to take any interest in them. A former page himself, Kolbe offered to mentor pages and kept in touch with some of them after they left the program, according to the interviews.

Kolbe once invited four former pages to make use of his Washington home while he was out of town, according to an instant message between Foley and another former page, Jordan Edmund, in January 2002. The pages planned to attend a first-year reunion of their page class. But because of a snowstorm, they did not take Kolbe up on his offer, according to one of the four pages.

Cline said one of the youths invited was a former page of Kolbe's. Because the congressman frequently travels on weekends, either to his Arizona ranch or abroad, the house is often available to friends, constituents, staffers and former staff members, such as a former page, she said.

You can kind of detect the code used by writers avoiding saying something explicitly, yet. "Close friend," "personal confidante", "overnight," etc. Then again, there's a certain degree of ambiguity there. The Post piece is ostensibly about the timeline of when House leadership was made aware of Foley, with only the subtheme being how Kolbe learned of it. The NBC report shifts the focus to Kolbe's own relationship with pages.

Posted by Laura at October 11, 2006 09:20 AM