US: The House of Representatives speaker, Dennis Hastert, is now expected to accept some responsibility for the Republicans' failure to investigate a congressman's behaviour towards teenage congressional assistants, in a last-ditch effort to save his career and his party's prospects in next month's elections.
As the House ethics committee sat in closed session to review how Mr Hastert and other leaders dealt with a Florida congressman who sent sexually charged e-mail to teenage congressional "pages", the speaker summoned reporters to his Illinois home in an attempt to take control of the scandal.
"He is taking responsibility because the buck stops with him," an official said ahead of the press conference. However, it was believed Mr Hastert would not go so far as to resign, "because that would be giving into the Democrat party's best wish".
A Republican official at the subsequent press conference said Mr Hastert would be asking the ethics committee to consider new rules so that anyone making inappropriate contact with congressional pages would be disciplined.
Mr Hastert has come under severe criticism from his fellow Republicans for his failure to take seriously the allegations against congressman Mark Foley.
"I think I could have given some good advice here, which is, you have to be curious, you have to ask all the questions you can think of," congressman Roy Blunt, the Republican's third most powerful leader in the House, told reporters. "You absolutely can't decide not to look into activities because one individual's parents don't want you to."
The pressure on Mr Hastert reached a tipping point yesterday, when a senior Republican aide revealed that he had approached the speaker's office at least three years ago about concerns that Mr Foley had behaved inappropriately towards male pages. Kirk Fordham had spent several years on Mr Foley's staff before taking a job with the Republican campaign chief, Tom Reynolds.
Mr Reynolds has also been implicated in the failure of the party's leadership to view the allegations against the congressman as a serious matter worthy of investigation, although so far Mr Hastert remains the first in the line of fire.
According to Mr Fordham, he had "more than one conversation" with Mr Hastert's aides to express his concerns about Mr Foley's conduct.
Mr Hastert's staff deny that any such conversation took place, and the speaker has remained unmoved by demands for his resignation, instead blaming the media and accusing Democrat "operatives" of manipulating the situation.
He even went so far, in an interview with the Chicago Tribune, as to suggest that former president Bill Clinton was in some way involved and claimed that people "funded by George Soros", the liberal billionaire and investment guru, "want to see the scandal blow up".
Mr Hastert spent the 24 hours before his press conference yesterday in his Chicago home trying to marshall support from within the Republican party.
Aides said he would wait to hear from the ethics committee before making any decision about his future.
The momentum however appeared to turn against the speaker, with conservative journals and commentators pressing for his resignation and the Republican congressman clamouring for a way out of a scandal that could cost the party its control of the House of Representatives.
Mr Foley resigned last Friday after being confronted by ABC News television with transcripts of sexually suggestive e-mails he wrote to a former page in 2005.
Transcripts of extremely graphic instant message exchanges with another former page in 2003 soon surfaced, raising more questions about when the Republican leadership found out about his conduct.
During the week since then the scandal has taken over the media, overwhelming Republican plans to make this election about the war on terror.
Yesterday it emerged that the FBI was preparing to question Mr Fordham.