( L - R ) Foley and Hastert

WASHINGTON (AP):

The House of Representatives' Ethics Committee opened an investigation yesterday into the unfolding scandal over Representative Mark Foley's come-ons to congressional interns and accusations even by some Republicans that House speaker Dennis Hastert failed to protect the teens.

The committee, evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, sat in closed session to take up a matter that imperils Hastert's leadership and has stirred extraordinary Republican infighting with elections barely a month away. All 435 seats in the House are at stake in the November 7 voting and the Democrats have a good chance of wresting control of the chamber from the Republicans. As speaker, Hastert, one of the most powerful men in Washington, sets the House legislative agenda.

Leaders of the ethics panel said they would speak publicly about the session afterwards.

Hastert asserted that any Republicans urging his ouster are playing into the hands of Democrats and blamed his problems on the media and Demo-cratic operatives, even suggesting former President Bill Clinton might somehow be involved.

"All I know is what I hear and what I see," he said in an interview with the Chicago Tribune on the eve of the ethics meeting. "I saw Bill Clinton's adviser, Richard Morris, was saying these guys knew about this all along, If somebody had this info, when they had it, we could have dealt with it then."