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A couple of random, assorted tidbits on the Foley case, including leftovers from my conversations with three of the four members of the Piedmont Triad's Congressional delegation about the Mark Foley scandal (today's story here):

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During my telephone conversation with him Thursday, Rep. Howard Coble, the 6th District Republican, called on the National Republican Congressional Committee to return $100,000 it received earlier this summer from former Rep. Foley's political-action committee. The NRCC works to elect Republican candidates to the U.S. House of Representatives. Because Republican control of the House is in jeopardy for the first time since that party took control of the chamber after the 1994 elections, the NRCC understandably wants to raise as much money as possible to help Republican candidates in close races. Foley, prior to news of his scandalous Internet communications, was considered a safe bet for re-election and still has roughly $2.8 million in his PAC.

The NRCC's problem, however, is that news reports indicate that the NRCC's chairman, Rep. Tom Reynolds of New York, had been told months ago about Foley's potentially problematic behavior. He accepted the money anyway -- and also is reported to have been instrumental in talking Foley, who had been thinking about retiring, into running for re-election this year.

No quid pro quo has been proved, Coble said, but "appearance-wise, it does not look good."

Rep. Virginia Foxx, the area's other Republican House member, has no problem with Reynolds' behavior. And she thinks that if at least two newspapers -- the Miami Herald and the St. Petersburg Times -- were onto the story but had chosen not to publish anything at the time the NRCC got Foley's money, she doesn't see why Reynolds should have done anything differently: "There were at least two newspaper outlets and they didn't think it was worth reporting. Then why fault Reynolds for doing what he did? If the news media had thought at the time that it was so inappropriate that something should have been done, then maybe they should have done something."

The St. Petersburg Times' executive editor, however, makes very clear the Times did, indeed, think the story was worth reporting, and the paper reported on it -- that is, reporters gathered what information they could for a story. Here's what happened next, he says:

I led deliberations with our top editors, and we concluded that we did not have enough substantiated information to reach beyond innuendo.

We were unsuccessful in getting members of Congress who were involved in the matter or those who administer the House page corps to acknowledge any problem with Foley's ambiguous e-mail or to suggest that they thought it was worth pursuing.

And we couldn't come up with a strong enough case to explain to a teenager's parents why, over their vehement pleas to drop the matter, we needed to make their son the subject of a story - and the incredible scrutiny that would surely follow.

It added up to this conclusion: To print what we had seemed to be a shortcut to taint a member of Congress without actually having the goods.

Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, said essentially the same thing to The Associated Press:

"Our decision at the time was ... that because the language was not sexually explicit and was subject to interpretation, from innocuous to 'sick,' as the page characterized it, to be cautious," said Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Herald. "Given the potentially devastating impact that a false suggestion of pedophilia could have on anyone, not to mention a congressman known to be gay, and lacking any corroborating information, we chose not to do a story."

With all due respect to Congresswoman Foxx, she appears to have misunderstood or misremembered the newspapers' positions.

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My story noted that Foxx, as have many other Bush supporters, says she thinks the whole story is a Democratic plot -- the proverbial October surprise in a close, high-stakes national campaign.

Anything's possible, but a number of recent developments are making that scenario less plausible:

• ABC News' Brian Ross, the lead dog in the journalistic pack following this story, has said that to the extent he knew his sources' political affiliations, his sources were Republicans.
• Florida's two biggest newspapers apparently were onto the story almost a year ago. With a single scrap of corroboration, the story might well have broken then, a year before the election.
• Three more former pages have come forward with allegations about Foley, ABC News reported.

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Foxx also called in today's story for the FBI to investigate "who had those e-mails and why they chose to release them on Friday," meaning Sept. 29. If it's someone who withheld the e-mails in order to protect Foley, that's one thing. But if it's someone who was a victim of Foley, or someone close to a victim, and that person had held onto the e-mails until last Friday out of fear of retribution, that's another question altogether: Calling for an FBI investigation of that subject now might well discourage others who have relevant information from coming forward.

It's a tricky question, inasmuch as right now we have no way of knowing for sure which category, if either, the source of the e-mails falls into.

UPDATE: It appears House Speaker Hastert has set up a toll-free telephone number and is asking that anyone who might have information on the case call him. Perhaps I'm worrying over nothing here, but doesn't this mean that he might hear from some of the same people the FBI and/or the Ethics Committee need to hear from, before those groups do? And if so, in the case of the FBI, is that even legal?

* * * Although Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit group, has been accused of leaking Foley's e-mails in an attempt to sway House elections, CREW says it turned all the e-mails it got over to the FBI in July.

CBS News recently reported that the FBI had claimed that the copies it got from CREW were "heavily redacted." The network also reported that the FBI claimed that it contacted CREW again, seeking additional information, and that CREW refused to cooperate.

Just one problem, CREW says: The FBI lied to CBS.

On Monday, CREW sent the Justice Department's Inspector General copies of what it says it sent in July: full, unredacted copies of the e-mails. CREW also says that the only phone call it got from the FBI subsequent to July was one confirming the e-mails were from Foley. It says it never received any requests for additional information.

On Thursday, CREW wrote the IG, seeking an investigation into why the FBI had disseminated an apparently false story about CREW.

The Washington Post recently quoted an anonymous FBI official as saying that the FBI had decided earlier that the e-mails "did not rise to the level of criminal activity." Now, if they didn't have all the information they needed, how could they make that determination?

(By the way, CREW's Web site has been swamped today; I just got a page saying that the site was down because its bandwidth limit had been exceeded.)

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As it happens, a new poll conducted after the Foley news broke has come out the district of Rep. Tom Reynolds, the NRCC chair, and it shows him trailing his Democratic challenger for the first time in the campaign, 50% to 45% with 5% undecided and a margin of error of 4%.

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Now that Mark Foley has resigned his seat, the House Ethics Committee (whose formal name actually is the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct) has no jurisdiction or authority over him. Accordingly, it will not be looking into Foley's behavior, but into the behavior of people still in the House or on its staff who might have known in detail about Foley's behavior and not reported or acted on it.

I wish I'd had room to make that small but important point in today's article.

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If, as columnist Robert Novak claims, Rep. Tom Reynolds talked Mark Foley into running for re-election this year despite knowing about possible problems with Foley's behavior, then why did Reynolds do so?

The most obvious answer is that this year, for a change, every seat counts if the GOP wishes to maintain control of the House, and Foley's seat was about as safe as they come: His smallest majority, which came in his first election in 1994, was 58%. Bush carried the district in 2000 and 2004, so there's no particular reason to think some other Republican would have done much worse if Foley had retired.

Rep. Brad Miller wonders whether the real issue wasn't Foley's seat so much as Foley's money. With $2.8 million in the bank and not much need to spend it on himself, Foley could afford to spread the wealth around to candidates in closer races. Doing so would not only help the GOP in close races, it also would mean that other House Republicans would owe Foley for the favor -- a debt that could conceivably be called in, sometime in the future, for support of a bill, support for a leadership position or some other benefit.

"I don't think I'll tell the Republicans what they should do with the NRCC," Miller said in an interview Thursday. "But Foley was a strong fund raiser, and that is valued by party committees in Washington sometimes more than knowledge of issues or ability to compromise or many of the other qualities I thought made the legislature work and would make Congress work, which it doesn't. Instead, the ability to raise money for your party is the most highly valued quality. That's all part and parcel of Congress being far too partisan and far more worried about election sthan getting things done. If it's true they were protecting him, it was to protect that seat, one, and second, to keep him around as a fund-raiser."

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AND, IN THE "YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS STUFF UP" DEPARTMENT: House Republicans have subpoeaned three Democrats, none of whom have been reported to have any involvement in the Mark Foley scandal, to appear before the House Ethics Committee. They're Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean, and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chair of the NRCC's Democratic counterpart, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.