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Senator in bathroom arrest rescinds vow to resign
The Associated Press

   WASHINGTON — Sen. Larry Craig said Wednesday he will remain in office while a Minnesota judge considers his bid to withdraw a guilty plea, overturning the senator’s previous statements of intent to resign by Sunday.
   The Idaho Republican said he will stay in office “for now,” but people close to him said he will remain until the judge rules. Hennepin County Judge Charles Porter said he probably won’t rule on the request until next month.
   Craig, who originally had planned to seek a third term next year, pleaded guilty in August to disorderly conduct following a June 11 sting operation in a men’s room at the Minneapolis airport.
   Craig’s comments Wednesday were greeted with chilly silence from Senate Republican leaders who have made clear they wish he would step down and let Idaho’s GOP governor name a replacement. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told reporters he had nothing to add to previous statements in which he said he thought Craig made the proper decision on Sept. 1, when he announced his intention to resign by the month’s end.
   “Today was a major step in the legal effort to clear my name,” Craig said in a statement Wednesday. “The court has not issued a ruling on my motion to withdraw my guilty plea. For now, I will continue my work in the U.S. Senate for Idaho.”
   He later told reporters in the Capitol he had nothing to add.  

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Senator charged in bathroom sting says he won’t resign
BY RICHARD SIMON AND P.J. HUFFSTUTTER
Los Angeles Times

   WASHINGTON — In the latest twist to the Larry Craig saga, the Republican senator from Idaho decided Thursday to stay in offi ce for the rest of his term, even after losing a legal bid to withdraw his guilty plea for disorderly conduct in a men’s restroom.
   Craig said his return to the Capitol after he became entangled in a sex-sting operation had convinced him that he can represent his state’s interests while also working to clear his name.
   But the decision to go back on his earlier pledge to resign if he lost in court surprised and infuriated some GOP colleagues. And it complicated the party’s struggle to move from under the cloud of ethical lapses that contributed to last year’s election losses -- and handed control of Congress to the Democrats.
   “He had his day in court. The judge ruled against him. He should keep his word,” said Sen. John Ensign of Nevada, who as the head of the Senate GOP campaign committee has his hands full trying to hold onto Republican seats in next year’s election.
   “If he loves his party, if he loves the Senate, he’ll keep his word,” Ensign said.
   Craig stayed out of sight on Capitol Hill on Thursday, avoiding reporters.
   Earlier in the day, a Minnesota judge rejected Craig’s request to withdraw the guilty plea that stemmed from his June arrest by an undercover officer investigating complaints of lewd conduct in a men’s restroom at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
   In a statement issued by his office Thursday, Craig said he was disappointed by the ruling but planned to remain in office until his term expires in January 2009. He also said he would not seek re- election.
   “I will continue to serve Idaho in the United States Senate,” he said. “As I continued to work for Idaho over the past three weeks here in the Senate, I have seen that it is possible for me to work here effectively.”
   How effective he can be is unclear. Craig did not show up for a roll-call vote Thursday. He remains stripped of his leadership positions on committees. And he faces an investigation by the Ethics Committee, which could decide to hold public hearings.
   Natalie Ravitz, a spokeswoman for Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., the committee chairwoman, said the panel is conducting a preliminary inquiry.
   The Ethics Committee can recommend a senator’s expulsion, which would require the approval of 67 senators, a two-thirds majority. The chamber has not expelled a member since 1862. In 1995, the Senate Ethics Committee did recommend that Sen. Bob Packwood, R-Ore., be expelled for sexual misconduct; he resigned about a month later.
   Craig, 62, has served almost 17 years as a senator — after spending 10 years in the House — and has become a leading voice on Western issues.
   In the lewd conduct case, he was accused of using established signals to indicate he was seeking sex, including tapping his foot, moving his foot to touch the undercover officer’s foot in the next stall and repeatedly sliding his hand under the restroom stall divider. He explained his actions to the officer by saying he has “a wide stance” and that he was picking a piece of paper up from the floor.
   Craig has denied any wrongdoing and said he regrets his guilty plea. The senator, who is married, has stated repeatedly that he is not gay.
   During a September news conference in Boise, Idaho, surrounded by friends and supporters, Craig announced that he intended to resign at the end of the month. But he later said he would stay in office pending a judge’s decision on his request to withdraw the guilty plea.
   On Thursday, Judge Charles A. Porter Jr. of the Hennepin County District Court in the Minneapolis suburb of Edina ruled against the senator, denying Craig’s petition because his guilty plea was “accurate, voluntary and intelligent, and because the conviction is supported by the evidence.” He said Craig knew what he was doing when he entered his plea, adding that “a career politician with a college education, is of, at least, aboveaverage intelligence.”
   Porter also concluded that by mailing in his plea, Craig was trying to avoid publicity. The judge said that action allowed Craig to keep potentially embarrassing details out of the public record. Those included the fact that Craig asked the prosecutor to send the paperwork to his office in Washington and that he had sent a hand-written note to the prosecutor thanking him for his “cooperation.”
   In the Capitol, a number of Craig’s usually chatty colleagues issued “no comments” on their way into the chamber, but others expressed their disappointment.
   “You don’t want to know how I really feel,” said Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C.
   Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who had called on Craig to resign, said, “The right thing for him to do was what he said he would do.”
   But Idaho’s junior Republican senator, Mike Crapo, and Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., expressed support for their colleague.
   “He’s got seniority, developed relationships, he’s got committee assignments that put him in a strong position to continue working hard for and representing Idaho. I support him,” Crapo said.
   Craig’s troubles have added to the GOP’s woes, which have included a search of Sen. Ted Stevens’ Alaska home by federal agents investigating corruption and Louisiana Sen. David Vitter’s apology for a “very serious sin” after his phone number turned up an alleged Washington madam’s records.

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Larry Craig should identify with other victims
Richard Cohen is a nationally syndicated columnist.
Richard Cohen

   I don’t know whether Larry Craig, the senator with an apparent case of restless leg syndrome (as seen on TV commercials), is gay or hetero or bi or whatever. I do know, though, that he is incapable of learning. Having been arrested in a Minneapolis airport men’s room, having been compelled (or so he says) into a false confession, having been roundly ridiculed and ostracized by many of his colleagues “” et tu, McCain? “” he has neither the gumption nor the integrity nor the wit to question some of his former positions which made him, without a doubt, a law-and-order conservative par excellence. Craig wasn’t exposed as gay. He was exposed as uneducable.
   Along with almost everyone else outside the Republican Senate Caucus “” when the door opens the blast of toxic hypocrisy is enough to deck the average person “” I can see no crime that Craig committed. At worst, he came on a bit to an undercover cop who spends his days protecting the public while seated on a commode and who, dollars to doughnuts, gave Craig a wink or the equivalent thereof. No cop is going to risk hemorrhoids and not come back with some arrests. He does what he needs to do, believing all the time that he is all that stands between Sodom, Gomorrah and the nearby Mall of America.
   But Craig says none of that happened. He didn’t do what the cop said he did, and what he did do “” that stretch of the leg “” was an innocent act. If it matters any, I don’t believe him. But I do believe he was set up and then coerced into pleading to a misdemeanor. If that’s the case “” if things went as he says “” why doesn’t he say he learned something from the incident? Maybe he wants to reconsider his votes in favor of restricting death penalty appeals because he now know that the cops can arrest the wrong person and get them to confess. Look, it happened to him.
   It has happened to others as well. We can start with the approximately 124 people who have been freed from death row since 1973 on account of DNA testing “” about one-quarter of whom had confessed. We can go on to John Mark Karr, who proved with his confession last year to the murder of JonBenet Ramsey that some confessions are nothing more than proof of delusion. And we can proceed to the famous Central Park jogger case in which five young men confessed to the rape and brutal beating of a young woman. Years later, a totally different person not only confessed to the crime, but supplied DNA matching the sample taken from the victim. If this had been a murder, or a black on white rape in the old days, the accused might already have been executed. In this case, the five young men were released from prison.
   Such cases are not legion, but they happen. Why they happen is often a mystery, but surely if a three-term U.S. senator can be pressured into confessing to a crime that he insists he did not commit, then something similar can happen to a rattled, undereducated kid who thinks the deck is stacked and is promised a reduced sentence. Cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys know that these things happen “” and they know too about the occasional rogue prosecutor who, for whatever reason, will send an innocent person to jail. Maybe Craig should read “Until Proven Innocent,” an account of the railroading of three Duke University lacrosse players by a despicable prosecutor and, truth be told, an intellectually lazy media as well. If three affluent college kids can be so victimized, think of what could happen — indeed, happens — to impoverished people all the time.
   The so-called war on crime is not really a war. In war, the innocent inevitably get killed “” collateral damage, it is obscenely called. But collateral damage in the war on crime, while still inevitable, can at least be rectified “” unless, of course, the “damaged” person is executed.
   Craig and others who voted for the death penalty and for restricting appeals and for mandatory sentences and for one penalty for crack and another for cocaine ought to ponder what happened to him “” what he said happened and what actually might have happened. Either way, it was an abuse of police power and, possibly, the coercion of a false confession. We await Larry Craig’s ringing speech on the matter. I shall write it for him. It’s the one in which he says that if a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged, then a liberal is a conservative who has been busted in a men’s room.  

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Sen. Craig still OK to Idaho Hall of Fame
The Associated Press

   BOISE, Idaho — Organizers had planned a pleasant dinner for Saturday, during which the tiny Idaho Hall of Fame would add a dozen inductees and renew its aim of honoring “real life heroes,” as its Web site states.
   Then Sen. Larry Craig, one of this year’s honorees, got arrested in an airport men’s room, and the private, nonprofit hall’s quiet evening out turned into a media spectacle.
   Michael Ritz, an Idaho Hall of Fame board member, said he has been bombarded with calls from national outlets wanting to know whether they can set up cameras at the $50-a-head function. Not inside, he tells them.
   A smiling Craig, who served a decade in the House before his 1990 election to the Senate, arrived at the event with his family.
   “He ... is excited that at least some Idahoans have not forgotten his three decades of public service to Idaho,” his spokesman Dan Whiting said in an e-mail.
   Craig, 62, was chosen for induction last spring, well before his arrest in a sex sting at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in June.
   It just didn’t seem right to renege on Craig’s nomination, Ritz said.
   “We thought, ‘It’s kind of going back on your word,’ ” he said. “Once a person has been sent a letter and voted into the Hall of Fame, it would be kind of like breaking a promise.”

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“We thought, ‘It’s kind of going back on your word,’ ” he said. “Once a person has been sent a letter and voted into the Hall of Fame, it would be kind of like breaking a promise.”

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“We thought, ‘It’s kind of going back on your word,’ ” he said. “Once a person has been sent a letter and voted into the Hall of Fame, it would be kind of like breaking a promise.”

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Sen. Craig fi les
appeal of ruling
   MINNEAPOLIS — Embattled Sen. Larry Craig asked the Minnesota Court of Appeals on Monday to overrule a county judge who refused to allow him to withdraw his guilty plea in connection with an arrest in an airport bathroom sex sting.
   Craig’s appeal was filed at the court in St. Paul less than two weeks after Hennepin County District Court Judge Charles Porter refused to overturn the guilty plea, saying it “was accurate, voluntary and intelligent, and … supported by the evidence.”
   Craig, a Republican from Idaho, pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct in August after he was accused of soliciting sex in a bathroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport in June.
   The four-page filing did not detail the basis for the appeal, noting only that Craig was appealing Porter’s Oct. 4 order.