"Domenici acknowledges having son outside marriage" by Jeri Clausing | Associated Press, February 21, 2013
ALBUQUERQUE — Former senator Pete Domenici has disclosed that he fathered a secret child in the 1970s with the 24-year-old daughter of one of his Senate colleagues, a startling revelation for a politician with a reputation as an upstanding family man.
Domenici and Michelle Laxalt sent statements to the Albuquerque Journal that announced the relationship for the first time and identified their son as Nevada attorney Adam Paul Laxalt. They said they decided to go public with their decades-old secret because they believed someone was about to release the information in an attempt to smear Domenici....
he retired in 2008....
The scandal has all the elements of an inside-the-Beltway soap opera.
Michelle Laxalt is the daughter of former senator Paul Laxalt, himself a significant political figure in the 1970s and ’80s as he served as Nevada governor and two terms in the Senate alongside Domenici.
Michelle Laxalt became a prominent lobbyist, Republican activist, and television commentator after the affair. She said in the statement that she chose to raise her son as a single parent and that the two agreed that it would be a private matter.
‘‘One night’s mistake led to pregnancy more than 30 years ago,’’ she said.
Laxalt’s prominence in national politics occasionally put her in an odd position of publicly discussing the integrity of the man who is the father of her child.
In 2008, Domenici was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee for his involvement in a scandal over the Bush administration’s firing of eight US attorneys.
At the time, Laxalt defended Domenici’s integrity on CNN, calling him an honorable man who was supporting ‘‘no fewer than eight children.’’
The website for Adam Laxalt’s law firm said he is a former Navy officer and lawyer who served in Iraq. He also worked for John Warner, when he was a senor from Virginia, and as a special assistant to an undersecretary of state, according to the website.
He has also written a number of conservative columns against policies like President Obama’s health care legislation and the lifting of the military’s ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ policy for gays for publications like the National Review Online, American Spectator, and the Las Vegas Review-Journal. And he serves on the board of Catholic Charities of Southern Nevada.
Domenici is the latest in a long line of politicians who were forced to reveal secret children, from onetime Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Just last week, Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee acknowledged that he is the father of a 24-year-old woman after the two were seen communicating on Twitter during the State of the Union address.
Earlier this month, the daughter of the late senator Strom Thurmond and his family’s black maid died in South Carolina. Essie Mae Washington-Williams did not identify him as her father until after his death at age 100 in 2003.
Domenici said he was sorry that he caused hurt and disappointment for his wife and other family members.
He said he disclosed the situation to his family several months ago....
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