The Latest Democratic Hitjob

I figured I would wait a day or two to start posting on this FoleyGate mess because I knew when there is a screaming netroot there is usually much more behind it then what first meets the eye. This case appears to be no exception.

Was Foley a perv? Most definately so. But the speed with which the Democrats came out swinging at the Republican leadership, accusing them of knowing about the sexually explicit emails long ago, gave me pause. Not because I believed them, but because this has been their modus operendi for every “scandal” for the past 6 years. Every single Democratic hitjob has begun like this and almost every single “scandal” has been proven to be nothing more then netroots stomping their feet shrilling crying “but those big bad evil Republicans just have to be wrong!”

Take for example these writers stomping away:

Top House Republicans knew for months about e-mail traffic between Representative Mark Foley and a former teenage page, but kept the matter secret and allowed Mr. Foley to remain head of a Congressional caucus on children’s issues, Republican lawmakers said Saturday.

The rub is that the Republican leadership was notified of an email exchange in which he asks the page how he is holding up after Katrina and then asks for a picture. While creepy this would not sound alarms nationwide that a pervert was on the loose.

Aides to the speaker and other Congressional Republican leaders said that the messages brought to their attention — described as “over friendly” — were much less explicit than others that came to light after ABC News disclosed the first e-mail correspondence. In those messages, Mr. Foley asked about the well-being of the boy, a Monroe, La., resident, after Hurricane Katrina and requested a photograph.

He wrote: “How are you weathering the hurricane. . .are you safe. . .send me a pic of you as well.”â€¦

“No one in the speaker’s office was made aware of the sexually explicit text messages which press reports suggest had been directed to another individual until they were revealed in the press and on the Internet this week,” the statement from Mr. Hastert’s office said.

They were not notified of the sexually explicit one.

So this paragraph in the Washington Post now appears to be true:

It was not immediately clear what actions Hastert took. His spokesman had said earlier that the speaker did not know of the sexually charged online exchanges between Foley and the boy.

But we are finding this out ONLY after two days of whining from the left. Hot Air found this interesting timeline:

As for what actions Hastert took, the Times fills in the blanks. FYI, “Alexander” is Rep. Rodney Alexander, the Congressman the Louisiana page worked for.

Mr. Alexander called the boy’s parents, who, he said Saturday, told him they did not want to pursue the matter but wanted Mr. Foley to stop.

Mr. Alexander’s office also contacted staff members in Mr. Hastert’s office for guidance on what to do and. According to the speaker’s account, his aides put Mr. Alexander’s staff in contact with the clerk of the House, who oversees the page program. The clerk, who at the time was Jeff Trandahl, referred the matter to Representative John Shimkus, the Illinois Republican who is the chairman of the House Page Board, in late 2005, a spokesman for Mr. Shimkus said.

Mr. Trandahl and Mr. Shimkus confronted Mr. Foley, who insisted he was simply acting as a mentor to the former page, officials said. He assured them nothing inappropriate had occurred.

“They asked Foley about the email,” the speaker’s statement said. “Congressman Shimkus and the clerk made it clear that to avoid even the appearance of impropriety and at the request of the parents, Congressman Foley was to immediately cease any communication with the young man.”

But you know what may be much more interesting to come out of this? The fact that a MSM outfit knew of these emails and sat on them: (via Rightwing Nuthouse)

My good friend and fellow American Thinker contributor Clarice Feldman left a comment that deserves to be elevated for greater readability. It is, something of an eye popper:

Reportedly the St Pete Times had the same information in August 2005 and wrote nothing about it either, apparently because the emails do not constitute illegal conduct, they are just creepy, and the boy’s parents did not wish to pursue this.

The far more damaging IM messages were released by CREW , the same “public interest” group which is representing the Wilson/Plames in their laughable suit against Cheney, et al.

When did they get the IM’s? Why did they wait until now to release them? Is there any indication the Republicans who looked into THIS MATTER had any knowledge of their(the IM’s) existence.

Pardon an old lady’s suspicions. I’ve seen this dance too many times before.

I read this morning that a Monroe, LA newspaper also had the story and didn’t run with it because there appeared to be no impropriety.
All along we have been led to believe that the Republican leadership knew of the disgusting IM’s but it now appears they knew of the much earlier email in which there was nothing sexually explicit.

What will the excuse be for some MSM outfits if they knew of the sick perverted exchanges and held onto them for an October Surprise?

Oh, and the difference between a Republican and a Democrat. We don’t make excuses for our bad politicians? I have not read one rightwing blog say, even once, that this guy just made a mistake..etc etc. No, we are all calling for his head on platter. I would be fine with this guys head on a platter, but to accuse the whole Republican party is simply another hitjob.

Remind me where the lefties were on Jefferson’s watch?

Remind me where they were on Gus Savage’s watch?

Known throughout his five congressional terms chiefly for his bombast, Democrat Gus Savage of Chicago is in a peck of trouble. He has been accused by a woman Peace Corps volunteer of engaging in sexual misconduct.

On a junket to Zaire last March, Savage found himself in the company of the 28-year-old volunteer, who was assigned to brief him on Peace Corps activities. She says that during a two-hour tour of the night spots of Kinshasa, Zaire’s capital city, Savage fondled her in his chauffeur-driven car and asked for sex. “He kept saying, ‘That’s the way the world works,’ ” she told the Washington Post. The woman says she escaped Savage’s advances when an embassy worker intervened. The next day U.S. Ambassador William Harrop rebuked Savage, and soon afterward the volunteer was sent back to the U.S. for counseling.

Savage, 63, reacted to the charges by calling the accusations racist. When a woman reporter approached him for comment, he growled, “Stay the f— out of my face!” Now in his face is the probability of an investigation by the House ethics committee.

Or Mel Reynolds watch?

He picked cotton as a child. He couldn’t read until he was 9. He also became a Rhodes scholar and was elected to Congress. But it was a convicted Mel Reynolds who emerged from Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building Thursday, sentenced to five years in prison for having sex with an underage girl and then covering it up.
Andrea Zapp

“He let his own personal needs for sexual gratification get in the way of being a law-abiding normal citizen and he has simply refused to accept his own conduct,” said Cook County Prosecutor Andrea Zopp. That conduct involved both phone sex and, a jury found, numerous liaisons with then-16-year-old Beverly Heard.

“You blew it,” said Judge Fred Suria, referring to Reynolds’ promising congressional career. “I think of all those things you could have done for education, for those kids who will join gangs because you weren’t there to help. You threw it away.”

Foley, Reynolds, Savage, Jefferson….they all deserve their fate.

UPDATE 10/1/06 0900hrs PST

Clarice Feldman has a post up at The American Thinker with lots of new information:

In July a blog appeared, designed it said to trace sex predators. Few posts were made in that month or the following month. All recounted years old stories. Then on September 18, the blog printed the fairly innocuous email exchange between Congressman Foley and an unnamed page.In this correspondence initiated by the former page, Foley asks the former page how he is after Katrina (the boy lived in Louisiana) and asked for a photo. Thus began the latest political kerfuffle which swirls through the final five weeks of the campaign. How likely is it that this site with virtually no readership , few posts and hardly any history or posts of interest suddenly receives this bombshell?

[…]Let’s track back what else we know of this story. Sometime last year a former page contacted the St. Petersburg Times with an exchange of emails between himself and Congressman Foley. In the words of the editor, they never ran the story. (The following has been realeased by the office of the Speaker of the House, but does not yet appear online at the time of this writing.)

In November of last year, we were given copies of an email exchange Foley had with a former page from Louisiana. Other news organizations later got them, too. The conversation in those emails was friendly chit-chat. Foley asked the boy about how he had come through Hurricane Katrina and about the boy’s upcoming birthday. In one of those emails, Foley casually asked theteen to send him a “pic” of himself. Also among those emails was the page’s exchange with a congressional staffer in the office of Rep. Alexander, who had been the teen’s sponsor in the page program. The teen shared his exchange he’d had with Foley and asked the staffer if she thought Foley was out of bounds.

There was nothing overtly sexual in the emails, but we assigned two reporters to find out more. We found the Louisiana page and talked with him.He told us Foley’s request for a photo made him uncomfortable so he never responded, but both he and his parents made clear we could not use his name if we wrote a story. We also found another page who was willing to go on the record, but his experience with Foley was different. He said Foley did send a few emails but never said anything in them that he found inappropriate. We tried to find other pages but had no luck. We spoke with Rep. Alexander, who said the boy’s family didn’t want it pursued, and Foley, who insisted he was merely trying to be friendly and never wanted to make the page uncomfortable.

So, what we had was a set of emails between Foley and a teenager, who wouldn’t go on the record about how those emails made him feel. As we said in today’s paper, our policy is that we don’t make accusations against people using unnamed sources. And given the seriousness of what would be implied in a story, it was critical that we have complete confidence in our sourcing. After much discussion among top editors at the paper, we concluded that the information we had on Foley last November didn’t meet our standard for publication. Evidently, other news organizations felt the same way.

Since that time, we revisited the question more than once, but never learned anything that changed our position. [b]The Louisiana boy’s emails broke into the open last weekend, when a blogger got copies and posted them online. Later that week, on Thursday, a news blog at the website of ABC News followed suit, with the addition of one new fact: Foley’s Democratic opponent, Tim Mahoney, was on the record about the Louisiana boy’s emails and was calling for an investigation. That’s when we wrote our first story,for Friday’s papers.

After ABC News broke the story on its website, someone contacted ABC and provided a detailed email exchange between Foley and at least one other page that was far different from what we had seen before. This was overtly sexual, not something Foley could dismiss as misinterpreted friendliness. That’s what drove Foley to resign on Friday.

First time I have heard about this blogger and this fact just muddies the water even more. A brand new blog with only a couple posts and no readership suddenly received a copy of the non-sexual email? Come on….

Clarice then prints Hasterts statement from last night:

In the fall of 2005 Tim Kennedy, a staff assistant in the Speaker’s Office, received a telephone call from Congressman Rodney Alexander’s Chief of Staff who indicated that he had an email exchange between Congressman Foley and a former House page. He did not reveal the specific text of the email but expressed that he and Congressman Alexander were concerned about it.

Tim Kennedy immediately discussed the matter with his supervisor, Mike Stokke, Speaker Hastert’s Deputy Chief of Staff. Stokke directed Kennedy to ask Ted Van Der Meid, the Speaker’s in house Counsel, who the proper person was for Congressman Alexander to report a problem related to a former page.Ted Van Der Meid told Kennedy it was the Clerk of the House who should be notified as the responsible House Officer for the page program. Later thatday Stokke met with Congressman Alexander’s Chief of Staff. Once again the specific content of the email was not discussed. Stokke called the Clerk and asked him to come to the Speaker’s Office so that he could put him together with Congressman Alexander’s Chief of Staff. The Clerk and Congressman Alexander’s Chief of Staff then went to the Clerk’s Office to discuss the matter.

The Clerk asked to see the text of the email. Congressman Alexander’s office declined citing the fact that the family wished to maintain as much privacy as possible and simply wanted the contact to stop. The Clerk asked if the email exchange was of a sexual nature and was assured it was not. Congressman Alexander’s Chief of Staff characterized the email exchange as over-friendly.

The Clerk then contacted Congressman Shimkus, the Chairman of the Page Board to request an immediate meeting. It appears he also notified Van Der Meid that he had received the complaint and was taking action. This is entirely consistent with what he would normally expect to occur as he was the Speaker’s Office liaison with the Clerk’s Office.

The Clerk and Congressman Shimkus met and then immediately met with Foley to discuss the matter. They asked Foley about the email. Congressman Shimkus and the Clerk made it clear that to avoid even the appearance of impropriety and at the request of the parents, Congressman Foley was to immediately cease any communication with the young man.

The Clerk recalls that later that day he encountered Van Der Meid on the House floor and reported to him that he and Shimkus personally had spoken to Foley and had taken corrective action.

Mindful of the sensitivity to the parent’s wishes to protect their child’s privacy and believing that they had promptly reported what they knew to the proper authorities Kennedy, Van Der Meid and Stokke did not discuss the matter with others in the Speaker’s Office.

Congressman Tom Reynolds in a statement issued today indicates that many months later, in the spring of 2006, he was approached by Congressman Alexander who mentioned the Foley issue from the previous fall. During a meeting with the Speaker he says he noted the issue which had been raised by Alexander and told the Speaker that an investigation was conducted by the Clerk of the House and Shimkus. While the Speaker does not explicitly recall this conversation, he has no reason to dispute Congressman Reynold’s recollection that he reported to him on the problem and its resolution.

No one in the Speaker’s Office was made aware of the sexually explicit text messages which press reports suggest had been directed to another individual until they were revealed in the press and on the internet this week. In fact, no one was ever made aware of any sexually explicit email or text messages at any time.

None of this should be surprising to you. As I suggested last night, the choreographed “outrage” and venom coming from the left on this story the last day or two should give anyone pause.

Now Clarice is putting the pieces of the puzzle together and it’s looking quite suspicious:

Brian Ross of ABC ran the story, beginning with the same “overly friendly” but not sexually suggestive email exchange and adding a series of instant messages dating to 2003 previously unseen by anyone in Congress between Foley and anonymous recipients said to be former pages. The Republican leaders, seeing the more damning correspondence, sought and got Foley’s resignation.

As soon as the ABC story ran, and organization called C.R.E.W., which said it had the original exchange which Hastert had heard of and the St Peterburg paper had seen, put them on their website .They said they’d earlier conveyed them to the FBI, were releasing them because of the ABC story, and asked for the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate the Republican leadership.It is abundantly clear to me that C.R.E.W. and ABC communicated and may have coordinated the release of this story.

Who is C.R.E.W.?

Here’s what The Hill wrote:

One target of Republican criticism is Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the group that last year assisted former Rep. Chris Bell (D-Texas) in drafting an ethics complaint against DeLay, which resulted in an admonishment of DeLay from the ethics committee. At last week’s press conference, Melanie Sloan, CREW’s executive director, said that DeLay should step down as majority leader.

From 1995 to 1998, CREW’s Sloan served as minority counsel for the House Judiciary Committee under Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.). Before that, Sloan served as the nominations counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee under Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.).

According to GOP research, Mark Penn, who had been a pollster for President Clinton, and Daniel Berger, a major Democratic donor, are on CREW’s board. Spokeswoman Naomi Seligman declined several requests to reveal the membership of CREW’s board, although she confirmed that Penn and Berger are members. Last year, Berger made a $100,000 contribution to America Coming Together (ACT), a 527 group that was dedicated to defeating Bush in the presidential election, according to politicalmoneyline.com, a website that tracks fundraising.

CREW declined to respond to the RNC talking points or House GOP research.

C.R.E.W. is one of four “public interest” organizations which the RNC has long identifed as major donors of George Soros richly-funded Open Society Institute. It is backing the risible Wilson/Plame civil suit against Cheney and others.

Clarice then goes on to detail Brian Ross’s background, which is obviously quite leftist.

Too many coincidences for me. You have an innocent sounding email getting a little attention on a new blog, then a day or two before the sexual IM’s appear Brian Ross writes a article about the innocent email. Then the obviously biased hitteam CREW suddenly finds old IM’s with sexual content on them. Hell, ABC hasn’t even revealed who received these IM’s yet….but Hastert and the Republican leadership knew all this a year ago.

These are two different incidents. The email recipient never responded back and his parents asked for anonymity, and just asked for the emails to stop. The sexual IM’s are a completely different incident to someone other then the email recipient, and at completely different times. Just because the Republican leadership knew about the email exchange does not mean they knew about the sexual IM’s…..not according to the left of course.

Come on. This has all the markings of another Plamegate, TexANG, and other assorted hitjobs prior to an election. None of them have worked well for the Democrats because their stories fall apart.

This one is no different.

UPDATE II 1430hrs PST

Mike from Mike’s America left a comment on this post with some very important points so I am going to reprint his comment in it’s entirety:

You left out the episode where Congressman Gerry Studds (DEMOCRAT-MA) actually DID have sex with a 17 year old male page and was merely “censured” by tne House, not forced to resign.

Once again we see the double standard in play.

It was right that Foley be forced to resign. It should have happened as soon as the full extant of his behavior came to light. The timing of this disclosure has “DEMOCRAT HIT JOB” smeared all over it.

Foley has never been accused of actually engaging in the act is rightfully forced to resign, but Democrats who HAVE gone all the way are censured?

Does this remind anyone else of Bill Clinton’s “private life?” Even though he used his office for a sexual affair with an intern, not to mention all those disgusting phone calls he made to Monica, and abused the power of his office to cover it up, he was never asked by Democrats to resign.

I find it laughable that all the lefty hysterics like those at AmericaBlog are calling for the resignation of the entire House GOP leadership over this episode.

First of all, they’ve called for the resignation, impeachment and prosecution of just about every GOP leader from Bush on down.

And nearly every one of them have done their utomost to shield elected Democrats from the same accountability they now fervently demand of Republicans.

Is Congressman William Jefferson (DEMOCRAT-Louisiana) who was videotaped accepting $100,000 cash later found in his freezer still a member of Congress? Enough said!

All very valid points. Foley never engaged in the actual act with this page, but a Democrat did. Not only did that Democrat not resign on his own, he was only censored by his fellow Congressmen.

Is this the very definition of hyprocrisy or what?

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