Justice Department investigators in Washington looking into former Arizona Rep. Jim Kolbe’s relationships with House pages found no wrongdoing and have closed their inquiry, Kolbe says.
Kolbe and his Washington lawyers said in a statement June 6 that they were notified a day earlier that investigators had completed a preliminary inquiry opened by federal prosecutors last fall, and saw no reason to pursue it further.
The U.S. attorney for Arizona, Daniel Knauss, had no immediate comment, said his spokesman, Wyn Hornbuckle.
Prosecutors began looking into Kolbe’s relationships with House pages after hearing reports that he took a Fourth of July camping trip to the Grand Canyon with two former pages and others in 1996.
The inquiry was launched amid a separate investigation into sexually explicit messages sent to high school-age congressional pages by former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., who resigned over the issue last fall.
“The action by the Justice Department is powerful evidence that the allegations of wrongdoing were unfounded,” said Kolbe, a Republican. “I am thankful for the department’s objective review of this matter and glad to have finally put this issue to rest.”
Kolbe represented a Tucson-area district for 22 years. He was the only openly gay Republican in the House until he retired at the end of his term last year. He was pulled into the Foley scandal when he acknowledged that a former page had complained in 2001 or 2002 about e-mails the page had received from Foley that made him feel uncomfortable.
Kolbe said at the time that he had referred the matter to the House clerk and that someone from his office had also talked to Foley about it.
A House ethics panel, which investigated House leaders’ handling of complaints about Foley, found in December that lawmakers and aides “failed to exercise appropriate diligence and oversight.” The panel, however, said no rules had been broken and no one should be punished.
Hellon: Kolbe unfairly targeted
Toni Hellon, a former Republican state senator who managed several of Kolbe’s campaigns, said she was glad to hear the investigation was closed.
“I’m relieved that it’s all over for him and his friends and supporters,” she said. “I don’t believe he would ever do anything that would put a smudge on that (page) program. I’m really relieved it’s over.”
Hellon said she thought Kolbe was unfairly swept up in the media frenzy surrounding Foley, and she was concerned that despite the Justice Department’s findings, the allegations would linger.
Pollster Margaret Kenski, who did polling for Kolbe throughout his career, shared the same concern.
“How many people are going to pay attention to the fact that they said there was no wrongdoing?” she said. “The damage has been done.”
She also questioned why it took nine years for the allegation to be made.
Attorney John Munger, former GOP chairman for Arizona and Pima County who was a freshman at Stanford when he met Kolbe, said he “wasn’t surprised” by the investigation’s close. “I never discussed it with Jim,” he said. “I frankly didn’t give the story enough credibility to merit any discussion with Jim. It’s just not true, and I knew it wasn’t true. That’s not Jim Kolbe.”
Munger said he saw Kolbe getting pulled into the media frenzy surrounding Foley because “we have become a culture of punishment seekers.”
“Too many people take pleasure in seeking to destroy people’s lives on the basis of disagreement and innuendo,” he said.
Kolbe, 64, is now a fellow at the German Marshall Fund think tank and a consultant at Kissinger McLarty Associates. He focuses on issues that were his priorities when he was in Congress — trade, aid and migration.
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