Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, July 27, 1990                   TAG: 9007270613
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A/2   EDITION: EVENING 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

APOLOGETIC FRANK SAYS VIOLATION `UNINTENTIONAL'

The House voted 408-18 to reprimand Frank on Thursday, rejecting conservative Republican efforts to censure or expel him.

But the ethics committee report mentions no link between Frank's then-unknown homosexuality and a misleading memo he wrote in 1986 to help prostitute Stephen Gobie, who then was on probation for sex and drug convictions.

And Rep. Julian Dixon, D-Calif., chairman of the ethics committee, said Frank's concern over revealing his sexual preference "does not, however, justify his making misleading statements."

Frank paid Gobie $80 for sex in 1985 then hired him as a personal assistant with his own money. Gobie's allegations touched off the ethics investigation last September.

The House, after three hours of sometimes heated floor debate, accepted the ethics committee's recommendation that Frank be reprimanded - the mildest punishment available. The charges centered on the memo and on 33 parking tickets, some of them accumulated by Gobie, that Frank had fixed.

By wide margins, the House rejected Republican proposals to censure or expel the five-term liberal Democrat from Massachusetts.

Frank, 50, said he hopes he can put the ethics controversy behind him and looks forward to wading back into legislative issues next week.

"This is a part of my life," Frank told reporters. "It's a part of which I am not particularly proud."

Speaking slowly but with little visible emotion from the well of the House, Frank told his colleagues that he accepted the committee report and took full responsibility for his actions.

"I am here to apologize to my colleagues, to this institution, to those around me," Frank said.

Frank watched much of the debate flanked by fellow members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation. Many colleagues approached him to shake hands or pat him on the shoulder. But few rose to defend him during the debate.

Frank said the April 16, 1986, memo was "obviously" the more serious of the two offenses cited by the ethics committee. He said he wrote it for Gobie after the prostitute asked for Frank's help in blocking extension of Gobie's probation on drug and sex convictions.

"I did in that memorandum misrepresent the facts because . . . it was necessary to conceal my homosexuality," he said.

It was a year later, in June 1987, that Frank first stated publicly that he is gay.

Under his congressional letterhead, Frank wrote a one-page document saying he met Gobie through mutual friends and asserting that Gobie was obeying the law. The committee said both those statements were false.

Frank passed the memo on to a friend identified only as a Virginia attorney. Unknown to Frank, the attorney sent the memo to a prosecutor overseeing Gobie's probation.

"It was just a sloppy thing," Frank said at a news conference later Thursday. A reprimand was the appropriate punishment, Frank said, "because of the unintentional nature of the transgression."

But Dixon said, "The fact does remain that the congressman prepared a document with statements that he knew to be misleading. These acknowledged misleading statements could be perceived as an attempt to apply political influence affecting the administration of Mr. Gobie's probation."

The session opened with conservative Republican Rep. William Dannemeyer of California proposing that Frank be expelled. Dannemeyer challenged the ethics committee's conclusion that Frank was unaware Gobie was running a prostitution ring out of the congressman's Capitol Hill apartment.

But Dixon rose and called Dannemeyer's statements "garbage," and the House voted down the expulsion proposal 390-38.

House GOP Whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia then proposed censure, a punishment that would have stripped Frank of a judiciary subcommittee chairmanship. But ethics committee members of both parties said censure was excessive and urged the House not to politicize the debate. The House rejected the censure proposal 287-141.