The Foley Scandal, Part One Billion

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Seems like my blog and many others are becoming Foleyscandal 24/7, but what can you do. You run with a story that can be quite confusing and deal with it.

First things first, Fordham, the former assistant to Foley had an interview with the AP:

In an extended interview in Washington Tuesday, Fordham described in detail helping Foley and his sister after they were confronted last Friday by ABC News with lurid instant messages Foley had apparently sent to teenage boys who were past congressional pages.

The longtime Capitol Hill staffer, his eyes red and speaking softly, said he tried to help Foley deal with questions about e-mails and private messages that exploded in the headlines late last week.

Fordham was Foley’s former chief of staff but has not worked him since 2004. Last Friday, he said he went to Foley’s house to help the lawmaker deal with the page scandal first reported by ABC News.

Fordham said when he learned the graphic sexual content of some of the instant messages, he confronted Foley.

“I said: ‘Are these authentic?’ and he said ‘probably,’ and he confirmed that they were likely his instant messages,” Fordham said.

Fordham said the immediate reaction of his current boss, Reynolds, was to get Foley to leave Congress.

“He told me (Foley) needed to resign,” said Fordham, adding that the National Republican Congressional Committee wrote the first draft of Foley’s resignation letter before it was rewritten on Foley’s official letterhead.

“I was still pretty shell shocked myself,” Fordham said of the day he learned about the messages. “This was someone I had worked for 10 years. I had no inkling that this kind of blatantly reckless – just obscene – behavior was going on behind our backs.”

Hmmmmmm, that’s weird. Didn’t Fordham say the following:

“The fact is, even prior to the existence of the Foley e-mail exchanges, I had more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene,” Fordham said.

Sure did. How in the hell does that jive? Answer, it doesn’t.

Then the latest news today is that the emails were supposedly leaked by a longtime Republican:

The source who in July gave news media Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-Fla.) suspect e-mails to a former House page says the documents came to him from a House GOP aide.

That aide has been a registered Republican since becoming eligible to vote, said the source, who showed The Hill public records supporting his claim.

The same source, who acted as an intermediary between the aide-turned-whistleblower and several news outlets, says the person who shared the documents is no longer employed in the House.

But the whistleblower was a paid GOP staffer when the documents were first given to the media.

[…]These revelations mean that Republicans who are calling for probes to discover what Democratic leaders and staff knew about Foley’s improper exchanges with under-age pages will likely be unable to show that the opposition party orchestrated the scandal now roiling the GOP just a month away from the midterm elections.

Not so fast. The man who wrote this piece, Alexander Bolton, has an interesting bio:

Prior to joining The Hill in 2000, Alexander Bolton was assistant to David Corn at The Nation magazine and interned at Roll Call. A native of Greenwich, Conn., he received his B.A. degree in philosophy from Princeton University.

Yes, THAT David Corn. The man who promised heads would roll in Bush’s White House regarding the Plame affair and the man that threw out this list of Republican aides who are gay….the same man who said this (via Ace of Spades HQ):

“I have no problem with what gay Republicans do in the privacy of their own bedrooms,” he says. “But when I see a gay wearing an American flag lapel-pin, or a ‘W’ sticker on the back of their cars, I can’t help but be a little bit nauseated. It’s one thing to have these inclinations, it’s another thing entirely to parade them around in public.”

Call me jaded, but I’m a bit suspicious of this Bolton.

But a bigger question in this whole thing, and pretty much the only one that needs answering. Who knew what and when.

The fact that these IM’s are so old and from Foley’s own computer and the fact that Rogers from Blogactive has been saying for over a year that something will come out on Foley prior to mid-terms should give everyone pause.

How is it that ABC, Blogactive, AMERICABlog, and this unheard of new blog Stop Sex Predators, all seemed to be working in unison to get as much publicity out of friendly emails, and then all of a sudden these IM’s appeared? Who got these emails from Foley’s computer? People have said in various blogs that they could have been from the IM recipient but that doesn’t jive with me. They are from 2003. IM programs save archives if you tell them to but for a 18+ year old kid to save these for 3 years just waiting for the day to spring them on Foley is a bit far-fetched.

There is just too much evidence that Rogers (Owner of Blogactive) and Aravosis (Owner of AMERICABlog) were intent on outing Foley. Plenty of posts of them talking about getting even with those Republicans who were closet gays and voting against legislation that Rogers and Aravosis believed in.

In the law enforcement world this is called intent. It was no secret they intended on outing Foley. No the question is did they have the means.

This is Aravosis reponse to the rumors:

Anyway, as you know, I published the Foley emails on my blog last Thursday after ABC News story broke. I had received the emails in July, as I already explained on this blog last Thursday, but I didn’t think it was appropriate to publish allegations of pedophilia/child sex predation, even against a member of the other political party, until I had all the facts (and not being Speaker Hastert, it’s not like I had access to the House GOP leadership, to Foley or the pages to quiz them about the emails). Shortly after I received the emails, I found out that CREW had also received copies of the emails and had immediately passed them to the FBI. I figured that took care of the situation (silly me to trust George Bush’s FBI, they didn’t investigate) and I let the issue go until I saw ABC had published the story last week and that Foley had confirmed to ABC that the emails were real.

Sure thing, he didn’t want to publish emails that asked a kid about his vacation and how he was doing and if he could have a picture. Because ANYONE looking at those would think, pedophile! Puhlease.

One last thing, Michelle Malkin has taken many of us to task for printing the name of this IM recipient, and I agree we need are hands spanked. In the fog of gathering information on what appears to be a generated scandal we forgot about the young man himself, and for that I apologize. I have since taken down the name….

UPDATE

Interesting article written by Michael Gaynor, but no one has been able to gauge the veracity of the info as of yet: (via The Strata-Sphere)

Democrat House Minority Leader and Speaker aspirant Nancy Pelosi and Representative Rahm Emanuel, Chairman of the House’s Democrat Campaign Committee, refused a request by a Republican Congressman to take a polygraph test designed to ascertain whether they knew about now former Republican Congressman Mark Foley’s misconduct (perhaps criminal misconduct) with respect to at least one Congressional page before it became public knowledge.

And AJStrata also found this:

Just as troubling are concerns among some House Democrat staff that there are potential scandals lurking of a similar vein for them. According to another Democrat source, “I’ve been warning my people to stay away from this story because you just don’t know what will come back to bite you.”

Of concern: that House Democrat leadership or Rep. Dale Kildee (Mich.), the Democrat member of the page board, who has served on it since 1985, or his staff have received complaints about Democrat colleagues’ perceived inappropriate communications or contact with pages or former pages, and have not brought those complaints to the board or House management, such as the House Clerk’s office. Kildee has been vocal about the Foley complaints not being brought before the full board prior to the scandal breaking, and the secretive nature of the Republican leadership’s attempts to bring closure to the scandal.

“We all know this kind of scandal isn’t just a Republican problem,” says a Democrat political consultant in Washington. “We don’t want to see what is out there about Democratic House members or former members.”

But other Democrats say more is to come, that talk among Democrats around town is that researchers at CREW and the House Democrat Congressional Campaign Committee have in recent weeks been in contact, and that there are additional stories involving Republicans and questionable ethics behavior to be leaked closer to election time.

No concerted presskrieg here….

UPDATE II

Riehl World View has another factoid about the obscure blog that supposedly started it all. It all boils down to this post at Daily KOS:

I have been reading with interest the various discussions with regard to Congressman Mark Foley. I am a White House Intern and have been in personal contact with Congressman Foley on numerous occasions.

Today I Googled Congressman Foley and came upon this website:

http://www.stopsexpredators.blogspot.com/

I was just shocked by what I found. I am especially upset by the dismissive attitudes I found on the web from those who know about Congressman Foley’s bad behavior in Washington. I’m sure his conservative base in Florida would not approve of him sending these suggestive and leading emails to underage interns.

Problem is that the post was dated Sept 24th and for a hit to come up on google in the first dozen pages regarding that obscure website is just completely unbelievable.

Entering Congressman Foley in Google produces over 3,000,000 hits given his years in Congress even before recent news. There is not a chance in hell anyone using Google on Sept 24 would have come across that site a mere 12 minutes or so after the post went up. As Radar On Line points out, Google ranks sites on inbound links. At the time of that post SSP had virtually none.

Rogers and Avarosis will have much explaining to do in the days to come.

Also check out AJStrata’s excellent timeline here.

UPDATE III

Wanted to expound on the outing of the IM young man. While I have taken out his name and the link to his MySpace page I do not believe the outing of his name is not noteworthy. The crux of the lefts allegations was that Foley was going after kids. Proving that the evidence so far gathered did not bear this out is not a insignificant point.

Now having said this, the outing should of been to the investigating authorities instead of via the blogosphere.

UPDATE IV

Newsbusters takes a look at the less the hard hitting coverage of the Democrat Mel Reynolds sex scandal, in which there was actual sex involved:

Congressman Mel Reynolds, the Democrat convicted of 12 charges, including sex with 16-year-old Beverly Heard and asking her to take pornographic photographs of a 15-year old, was indicted on August 21, 1994. ABC, the current scourge of congressional teen-sex scandals, reported nothing – until Reynolds was convicted a year later, on August 23, 1995. In fact, on May 13, 1994, ABC featured Reynolds in a “Person of the Week” speaking out in favor of two Chicago ladies fighting child molesters:

Peter Jennings: ” Their local congressman is certainly on their side. He also wants to make child molesting a federal offense.”

Rep. Mel Reynolds (D), Illinois: “These ladies really illustrate how being active in your community can really make a difference.”

Jennings: ” If the law is to change, it will need the support of many more state legislators, which means more mothers will have to get involved.”

ABC’s World News Tonight story on Reynolds being convicted on August 23, 1995, didn’t have any fury about how Democrats could allow this sexual predator in their caucus. For their part, ABC seemed more suffused with sadness than outrage.
And there is that outrage over reading the emails of terrorists….but no outrage involved when it concerns a Republican gay man talking to an over the age of consent young male.

UPDATE V 1315hrs PST

I step away from the puter for a few and all hell breaks loose. First news from Drudge that the IM’s may have been a prank, which I find hard to believe especially since Foley resigned quickly and admitted he is gay:

According to two people close to former congressional page Jordan Edmund, the now famous lurid AOL Instant Message exchanges that led to the resignation of Mark Foley were part of an online prank that by mistake got into the hands of enemy political operatives, the DRUDGE REPORT can reveal.

According to one Oklahoma source who knows the former page very well, Edmund, a conservative Republican, goaded an unwitting Foley to type embarrassing comments that were then shared with a small group of young Hill politicos. The prank went awry when the saved IM sessions got into the hands of political operatives favorable to Democrats.

The primary source, an ally of Edmund, adamantly proclaims that the former page is not a homosexual. The prank scenario was confirmed by a second associate of Edmund. Both are fearful that their political careers will be affected if they are publicly brought into the investigation.

The prank scenario only applies to the Edmund IM sessions and does not necessarily apply to any other exchanges between the former congressman and others.

The news come on the heels that Edmund has hired former Timothy McVeigh attorney, Stephen Jones.

Not sure where this is going except a high powered defense attorney has now been employed by the young man. A defense attorney is usually hired when your charged with a crime so this is quite unusual.

What has been going around the blogosphere is this Betsy Newmark exchange during a podcast roundtable with other conservative bloggers: (via Right Wing Howler)

Here are Betsy’s comments:

“Foley is a complete sleaze, he has got a real problem, but let me say, this kid is not an innocent kid. You read those things, he’s leading him on. He’s like a little Lolita. And what I picture, I picture this kid, he’s in his dorm room, or wherever he is, and he has got 3 or 4 friends on and they’re just giggling themselves silly. “Look what I got this Congressman to say.” That’s why he saved these IM messages, so he could send it around to all his friends and they could laugh at this poor, middle-aged Congressman who is so pitiful and has got some real sick problems. It just seems to be the type of thing that teenaged boys would have thought was so funny. This isn’t some kid who is innocently appalled at what he’s getting. He’s leading that guy on.”

What can I say other than, here’s to Betsy, she nailed it right on the nose.
Just when you thought this scandal couldn’t get more complicated.

Now onto the Hastert press briefing:

House Speaker Dennis Hastert defiantly declared Thursday that he’d done nothing wrong relating to the growing Capitol Hill page scandal, and vowed to run again for speaker after the GOP wins back the House in next month’s election.

“I’d like to run and presumably win in this election, and when we do, I expect to run for leader, for speaker,” Hastert said.

The Illinois Republican said he is taking full responsibility for not being more aggressive in the investigation of former Rep. Mark Foley’s inappropriate communications with two underage pages, but said he only heard about Foley’s e-mails and explicit instant messages to one of the pages after it appeared in the press last Friday, Sept. 29.

“Our children need to be protected and we’re going to do everything we can to protect them,” Hastert told reporters gathered outside his district office in Batavia, Ill.

“I only know what I’ve seen in the press and what I’ve heard. The fact is we have turned this whole thing over to the FBI,” he said, adding that the system of protecting pages, “obviously isn’t designed for the electronic age of instant messages.”

Hastert had been expected to name an independent House investigator to look into Foley’s communiqués with pages and the GOP’s handling of it, with former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s name floated as a possible choice. Hastert, however, did not make that announcement.

While I have never come to the defense of Hastert since the Jefferson debacle, I have to agree with him here. There is absolutely no reason for him to step down.

Now the other big news is that Hastert wanted to have Freeh investigate this whole matter, but guess who are shooting this idea down? The Democrats:

Fast-moving developments developing fast: Freeh’s appointment blocked by Dems

Other’s Blogging:


How is it that ABC, Blogactive, AMERICABlog, and this unheard of new blog Stop Sex Predators, all seemed to be working in unison to get as much publicity out of friendly emails, and then all of a sudden these IM’s appeared? Who got these emails from Foley’s computer? People have said in various blogs that they could have been from the IM recipient but that doesn’t jive with me. They are from 2003. IM programs save archives if you tell them to but for a 18+ year old kid to save these for 3 years just waiting for the day to spring them on Foley is a bit far-fetched.

There is just too much evidence that Rogers (Owner of Blogactive) and Aravosis (Owner of AMERICABlog) were intent on outing Foley. Plenty of posts of them talking about getting even with those Republicans who were closet gays and voting against legislation that Rogers and Aravosis believed in.

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Should have known that David Corn would somehow be involved. That guy rates as an “evil idiot” in my book…

Interesting that Pelosi didn’t want to appoint Freeh. What’s she afraid of? Of course this gets almost ZERO coverage.

And as for the “White House Intern” at Daily Kos, it strikes me as just a bit too much like some idiot is out to avenge Monica.

These Kossacks are such liars. And they’re not even very good at it.

Last night on Nancy Grace, Mike Rogers admitted that he has been monitoring Foleys AIM account. From there it is a quick jump to enticing.

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