On the August 30 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, host Chris Matthews did not challenge former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's (R-TX) assertion that former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) “resigned from Congress because the Republicans demanded that he resign from Congress.” In fact, as Media Matters for America noted, ABC News chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross, who broke the story, reported on September 29, 2006, that Foley resigned “hours after ABC News questioned him about sexually explicit internet messages with current and former congressional pages under the age of 18.” And during an October 2, 2006, press conference, then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) stated that “Foley resigned almost immediately upon the outbreak of this information, and so we really didn't have a chance to ask him to resign,” as Media Matters also noted. Furthermore, while a House Ethics Committee report on the scandal found no evidence that Hastert or other members of the Republican leadership knew about the sexually explicit instant messages that Foley allegedly sent to pages, the committee did find that “the weight of the evidence supports the conclusion that Speaker Hastert was told, at least in passing, about the emails [Foley had sent to a former page] by both Majority Leader [John] Boehner [R-OH] and Rep. [Tom] Reynolds [R-NY] in spring 2006,” several months before Foley resigned.

From Hastert's press conference:

Q: Could you clarify, sir, whether the leadership asked Foley to resign and also I believe you did go -- you left on Friday. Did you have an event in your district?

HASTERT: I think Foley resigned almost immediately upon the outbreak of this information, and so we really didn't have a chance to ask him to resign, and I left at the very end of the session, almost, before the very last vote.

During his interview, while referring to the Foley scandal, DeLay also asserted that “a leftist group called CREW [Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington] held onto it [evidence of Foley's email communications to House pages] for over a year before they pulled the trigger on the day of adjournment.” In fact, as Media Matters has noted, in a review of the handling of the Foley case, the Justice Department Office of the Inspector General (OIG) found that the Justice Department and the FBI “inaccurately suggested” that actions by CREW “were the cause of the FBI's decision not to investigate the emails.”

Further, in a January 23 article, The Washington Post reported that CREW “notified the FBI within days of obtaining the electronic communications”:

The FBI should have acted last summer to protect underage congressional pages after it was given “troubling” electronic messages sent by then-Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.), according to a report released yesterday.

The review by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine also found that FBI and Justice officials misled the news media last fall when they asserted that an activist group that first provided the FBI with Foley's messages had not been cooperative and had withheld vital information from investigators.

In fact, Fine's report found that the group -- Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility [sic] in Washington, or CREW -- had notified the FBI within days of obtaining the electronic communications in July. But the FBI never asked for additional information from the group and never sought to interview the former page in Louisiana who received the messages from Foley, the report said.

Later in the program, while discussing reports that Sen. Larry Craig (R-IL) will be forced to resign following his guilty plea for misdemeanor disorderly conduct, Matthews asserted: “The truth of the matter is, Republicans are generally culturally conservative, the people who vote Republican, especially from the part of the country that Larry Craig comes from.” He then asked Townhall.com columnist Amanda Carpenter: “Do you have a sense, Amanda, that they will begin a drumbeat here to make it happen?” Carpenter, suggesting that the Republican Party was responsible for removing Foley, replied: “Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is something -- it's a terrible thing to come out like this and it's even worse that he's lying about it, if that's the case. You know, it's time to stand their ground. Just like they got rid of Mark Foley, they're going to have to get rid of Larry Craig.”

From the August 30 edition of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews:

DeLAY: What happened to Mark Foley? The day that we found about it -- by the way, a leftist group called CREW held onto it for over a year before they pulled the trigger on the day of adjournment --

MATTHEWS: Yeah.

DeLAY: -- on Mark Foley -- that very day, he resigned from Congress because the Republicans demanded that he resign from Congress.

MATTHEWS: Right.

[...]

MATTHEWS: The truth of the matter is, Republicans are generally culturally conservative, the people who vote Republican, especially from the part of the country that Larry Craig comes from. Do you have a sense, Amanda, that they will begin a drumbeat here to make it happen?

CARPENTER: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is something -- it's a terrible thing to come out like this and it's even worse that he's lying about it, if that's the case. You know, it's time to stand their ground. Just like they got rid of Mark Foley, they're going to have to get rid of Larry Craig.