navy, and i got a tip of an altercation he had with a campaigner an election lost. right, but he made allegations against a campaign manager that he later retracted about his son, all sorts of weird things. when i got in touch with these people t led to his navy colleagues, and now we see this whole line of people who have been groped or had strange encounters with massa. you got a lot of these colleagues to go on the record with you about his behavior. i guess my question is, what explanation do they give to you? why didn t they go to their to eric massa s senior officer and say, hey, he s doing this. why wouldn t they report it at the time? i think it was the fear of retaliation. massa was the number three commander on the ship, very senior. he was someone that people in the navy had pegged as somebody
that was senator ensign in june. he s been under investigation by both the senate ethics committee and the fbi. the investigators think they have evidence that the senator tried to get lobbying work for a former aide that just happens to be the husband of senator ensign s former mistress. how much trouble is he in? we re going to talk about ensign and also get into the middle east and joe biden and that rough trip over there. nobody having a good week, it seems, this week. gentlemen, this seems to be, in an odd way, a much more serious charge than finger i can massa is dealing with. he s still there. massa resigned, so that stops the bleeding for the democrats and the house. ensign is not going to resign, apparently. he s made that clear in the last few months, but it s the use of his office, too. by the way, for the record, the ensign folks have put out a statement and they ve denied he has done anything illegal or against the law, which includes this allegation of using his
do they see it coming? these things move faster and faster and faster. it was only two years ago that it was mark foley and republicans causing all this, and now you have all these scandals. you have the skeptical massa thing, knowing when the house voted today to start an investigative subcommittee which is presumably issuing a report on june 30, much before the mid-term election, so you see a wave where democrats can run smack into problems like the republicans did. how quickly would the ethics committee it s not a formal it s not like they have to start an investigation, but one would assume they probably would start one just for political reasons. how quickly would it start up? with the overwhelming vote in favor of this, it would suggest they would do it. they had only barely begun before massa had resigned. they could get going quite quickly, but these things usually take a long time, so the
that there was simply someone saying congressman massa is walking a line here. he s getting himself in trouble, but they didn t know what? at the time they didn t know there were advances being made, but people were concerned about the atmosphere, the foul language, maybe spending too much time with staffers all kind of living together. he had a home back in his district and had sort of an unconventional way to live in his district. that was really the issue was just kind of some problems on the horizon, different than these more specific allegations. that s her claim. josh green, you ve done some reporting about sort of unusual behavior he exerted when he was in the navy, but you said in your reporting you were tipped off about somer i can massa allegations when he was first running for congress. so if you were tipped off, do we think that other democratic, at least campaign types, might have known something? i think so. massa has been a powder keg going back to his time in the
that eric massa s resignation would be enough. it wasn t because there was some confusion about when did democratic officials know of some kind of problem happening in the office of the former new york congressman? so how does the story go? well, there have been questions about what did the speaker know? now, senior aides to the speaker say their office was given some information back in october, but not rising to the level of these sexual harassment allegations, it was really of a different tone. they said they were warned by one of massa s staffers at the time that the congressman had too many staffers, had been living with some of his staffers, and there were concerns about foul language. so today the speaker said that she did not know about the sexual harassment allegations until very late in the game. and so she is contending that she and her office were not aware for months. republicans raised that question. of course, the obvious implication is that they might have been hiding i