Well isn't that interesting. When I received the Foley emails this past July, had I been warned two or three years ago that Foley was stalking pages, I'd have turned the emails over to the FBI myself, not waiting for CREW to do it (which was shortly after I received them anyway). But I didn't receive the warnings Denny Hastert received. I didn't know five years ago that Foley was stalking pages - like Denny Haster knew, since his office warned the pages 5 years ago to stay away from Foley.
Had the news media known what Denny Hastert knew, I bet they'd all have turned their information over to the FBI toute de suite. But the only person who knew the full story about Mark Foley sexually harassing underage pages was Denny Hastert and the Republican majority in the House. And they covered it all up for as long as they could.
And this article is another nail in the Republicans' coffin.
From the NYT:
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert's chief of staff confronted then-Rep. Mark Foley about his inappropriate social contact with male pages well before the speaker said aides in his office took any action, a current congressional staff member with personal knowledge of Foley and his behavior with pages said yesterday.
The staff member said Hastert's chief of staff, Scott Palmer, met with the Florida Republican at the Capitol to discuss complaints about Foley's behavior toward pages. The alleged meeting occurred long before Hastert says aides in his office dispatched Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.) and the clerk of the House in November 2005 to confront Foley about troubling e-mails he had sent to a Louisiana boy.
The staff member's account buttresses the position of Foley's onetime chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, who said earlier this week that he had appealed to Palmer in 2003 or earlier to intervene, after Fordham's own efforts to stop Foley's behavior had failed. Fordham said Foley and Palmer, one of the most powerful figures in the House of Representatives, met within days to discuss the allegations.
