Congressional Affairs

The House ethics committee has concluded that Rep. Gus Savage (D-Ill.) made improper "sexual advances" to a young female Peace Corps volunteer during an official trip to Zaire last March, according to the committee's official report. In its unreleased report, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press, the committee said it was not taking disciplinary action because Savage had written a letter of apology to the woman. But the panel made clear that similar conduct by House members in the future could incur disciplinary action. It was putting members "on notice" that future such conduct...

Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank disclosed his homosexuality in 1987 and was re-elected the next year by a 70% majority. Now the Democrat must again test his constituents' tolerance of his sexual habits. Last week, after the Washington Times broke the story, Frank admitted that in 1985 he paid for sex from a male prostitute who had advertised in a gay newspaper.

Rep. Donald E. (Buz) Lukens (R-Ohio) was convicted today of having sex with a 16-year-old girl whose mother accused the congressman of offering her a government job to buy her silence. Hours after the verdict, another Ohio congressman called for Lukens' resignation, but an aide predicted Lukens will seek reelection next year. "I think he should do the gentlemanly thing and resign," said Rep. Chalmers P. Wylie, the senior Republican in the Ohio delegation. A jury deliberated for 90 minutes before convicting Lukens of contributing to the delinquency and unruliness of a minor, stemming from an...

The Miami Herald reported yesterday that a news team that staked out Democratic presidential front-runner Gary Hart's Capitol Hill town house determined that a young woman from Miami spent Friday night and Saturday with him while his wife was in Denver. Hart, whose campaign has been debating for three weeks how to deal with questions of alleged "womanizing," denounced the story as "preposterous" and "inaccurate." He said he is the victim of "character assassination" by unethical and "outrageous" journalism that is "reduced to hiding in bushes, peeking in windows and personal harassment." The...

Speeding without lights down a street near the White House at 2 o'clock one morning last week, the 1973 Lincoln Continental bore five people toward the Jefferson Memorial. Among them was an odd couple: an intoxicated, aging man with a badly scratched face and bloody nose and a hysterical, curvaceous woman. When police halted the car, the woman leaped out and jumped into the nearby Tidal Basin, a 10-ft.-deep estuary of the Potomac River. The man stumbled out after her,