ShareThisBy AMIE PARNES
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has upgraded to a "full-fledged criminal investigation" its initial inquiry of former Rep. Mark Foley's reported communications with teenage boys, a spokeswoman told Scripps Howard News Service Thursday.
"We were until recently conducting a preliminary investigation," said spokeswoman Kristen Perezluha. "Now we are conducting a full-fledged criminal investigation."
Perezluha added that the agency had probable cause to continue with the investigation.
"Usually we establish if there is factual and credible information to start looking at it for criminal violations," Perezluha added. "We've been assisting the FBI."
FBI officials could not be reached immediately for comment.
News of the investigation came as Foley was spotted coming out of a private residence in Palm Beach, Fla., with his attorney David Roth, on Thursday. The two men went to Roth's office in West Palm Beach, where they spent the afternoon, a Florida TV station reported.
Foley was until recently at a rehabilitation center in Tucson, Ariz., where he was receiving treatment for alcohol and behavioral issues.
Foley is believed to be back in town to attend his father Edward's funeral this weekend. Foley, 52, resigned from Congress in late September after reports surfaced that he exchanged a series of sexually explicit online messages with a teenage congressional page.
Since then, Roth has said that a clergyman sexually abused Foley when he was a teenager. Days later, a priest, Anthony Mercieca, who has retired to the island nation of Malta, admitted having inappropriate encounters with Foley, including massaging him in the nude and skinny-dipping together. He denied ever having sex with Foley.
Foley, "does not blame the trauma he sustained as a young adolescent for his totally inappropriate e-mails," Roth said at the time. "He continues to offer no excuse whatsoever for his conduct."
Still, Roth added, "any suggestion that Mark Foley is a pedophile is false."
