Despite countless hours of TV coverage and reams of newspaper reporting on the House's handling of the Mark Foley page scandal, numerous fundamental questions remain unanswered as the FBI and the House ethics committee begin their first full week of inquiries.

Gaps and inconsistencies in the public accounts include such basic matters as when House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and his top aides first learned of concerns about Foley's relationships with male pages, and what they did about it. Also unclear is which GOP officials decided that only two members of the six-person House Page Board should confront the Florida lawmaker.

And accounts differ on whether the two board members knew the exact contents of e-mails Foley sent last year to a teenage boy in Louisiana. Those messages alarmed the boy and his parents and set into motion the events that eventually would uncover far more sexually graphic messages to other former pages, triggering Foley's abrupt resignation a week ago.

Armed with subpoena power, investigators for the FBI and the ethics committee will pursue scores of questions, almost surely including:

Who decided to keep word of the Louisiana e-mails closely held, so that only a handful of House Republicans -- and no Democrats -- knew of them?

Various accounts agree that only two people -- Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.), chairman of the Page Board, and then-House Clerk Jeff Trandahl, also a board member -- confronted Foley in November 2005 about the messages. But none has definitively said who decided that only those two should handle the task.

A Sept. 30 "internal review" released by Hastert's office says that aides to Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.) alerted Hastert's aides to the e-mails. Among those dealing with the matter were Hastert's deputy chief of staff, Mike Stokke, and his in-house counsel, Ted Van Der Meid.

Stokke contacted Trandahl, who then contacted Shimkus. The review says Trandahl and Shimkus "immediately met" with Foley. But it does not say who chose the meeting's participants, and why other Page Board members -- including Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Rep. Dale E. Kildee (D-Mich.) and Sergeant-at-Arms Wilson "Bill" Livingood -- were never alerted.

Some lawmakers say Capito, Kildee and Livingood might have urged queries to current and former pages, which could have turned up accounts of Foley's unusual friendliness to the youths and his sexually explicit messages to some of them. Such accounts were quietly traded among pages, former pages and some House staff members, according to recent news reports.

Did Trandahl and Shimkus know exactly what the e-mails to the Louisiana boy said?

Hastert's internal review indicates that the two men did not know the e-mails' precise language when they sat down with Foley, because Alexander's staff refused to divulge it at the boy's parents' request. That may have put the two men at a disadvantage when confronting Foley, who assured them that the messages and his intentions were innocent.

Shimkus has said Alexander's staff did provide him with the text of the e-mails before he confronted Foley. In them, Foley requested a photo of the boy, then 16, and asked what he wanted for his birthday. The boy told an acquaintance he found the request "sick, sick, sick."

How did House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) handle word of the Louisiana e-mails?

Hours after Foley resigned Sept. 29, Boehner told The Washington Post that he had heard last spring of some contact between Foley and a 16-year-old boy. He said he mentioned it to Hastert, who assured him "we're taking care of it." Soon after The Post asked the speaker's staff for comment on the remarks, Boehner called the paper and said he could not recall whether he had spoken to Hastert about the matter.

On Tuesday, Boehner told a Cincinnati radio station: "I believe I had talked to the speaker, and he told me it had been taken care of. My position is, it's in his corner, it's his responsibility."

Did Hastert know about the e-mails to the Louisiana boy?

Reinforcing Boehner's initial comments, Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.) -- chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee -- says he learned of the e-mails from Alexander this year and told Hastert about them. "I took logical, common-sense steps of notifying my supervisor," Reynolds told the public radio program "On Point" Thursday. "My supervisor was the speaker of the House."

Hastert says he does not recall such conversations with Reynolds or Boehner, but he does not dispute that they may have occurred. He says that Stokke and Van Der Meid did not tell him about the e-mails and that there was no reason for them to do so. Hastert says he does not recall hearing of concerns about Foley's dealings with teenagers until the day Foley resigned.

Was Hastert's staff alerted to earlier concerns about Foley's behavior toward teenage pages?

Kirk Fordham, who served as chief of staff to Foley and later to Reynolds, says that in 2003 he repeatedly asked Hastert's staff to help put a stop to the Floridian's inappropriate attention to male pages on Capitol Hill. Fordham says that he appealed especially to Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, and that Palmer discussed the matter with Foley in a Capitol meeting.

A congressional staff member with personal knowledge of Foley and his actions has told The Post that Fordham's account is accurate. But Palmer has said through a spokesman that Fordham's account is untrue.

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