Earlier today when an ethics subcommittee found that he had violated House rules, Mr. Traficant threatened to go after the panel members.

Although the ethics subcommittee's findings may have clarified questions of impropriety, many of Mr. Gingrich's constituents are still struggling to understand the facts.

The ethics subcommittee, which audited the bank accounts, and then the full committee, debated for hours on the criteria by which to select the number of members who would be embarrassed.

He served on the environment, the housing & real property and the natural resources & ethics subcommittees in 2005.

The politicians agreed among themselves how they could use their opponents' comments to attack the subcommittee's findings indirectly without technically violating the agreement that Mr. Gingrich's lawyers made with the ethics subcommittee.

Mr. Gingrich's office today did not question the authenticity of the conversation, but insisted that it did not violate any agreement with the ethics subcommittee.

On Friday, an ethics subcommittee apparently presented Mr. Gingrich and his lawyer with a Gingrich statement that it thought was false concerning the college course.

An ethics subcommittee is putting the final touches on a review of the defunct financial institution, and preparing a list of members who overdrew their accounts repeatedly by tens of thousands of dollars.

The process by which the names will become public has not been decided, but the ethics subcommittee is expected to assemble a final list by next week.

The bipartisan ethics subcommittee at first supported Mr. Cole in wanting to charge that the Speaker "knew or should have known" he was giving it false information.