ABC says it was Republicans, not Dems, who were its sources for Foley story

So much for that defense.

[ABC correspondent Brian] Ross dismissed suggestions by some Republicans that the news was disseminated as part of a smear campaign against Mr. Foley.

“I hate to give up sources, but to the extent that I know the political parties of any of the people who helped us, it would be the same party,” Mr. Ross said, referring to Republicans.

And let's not forget that the FBI had these emails in July of this year (the same time I got a hold of them). CREW, to its credit, received the emails and the same day passed them along to the FBI.

Did the FBI investigate? No.

Did someone in the FBI pass the emails along to the media to hurt the Republicans, or to hurt Foley or Hastert (i.e., Republican in-fighting)? Who knows. There appear to have been just as many Republicans as Democrats who had access to these emails - starting with the Foley Five, as Air America is calling them: Hastert; Boehner; Reynolds; Shimkus; and Alexander; AND their staffs. Did one of them or their staffs have reason to try to take down Hastert in an effort to replace the House leadership with someone more to their liking? Or simply were they fed up that this travesty of justice was not being dealt with seriously?

I've spoken to others in town, and lots of people seemed to have had copies of these emails. But to their credit, the reporters and others held their fire since accusing someone of pedophilia can end their career, even if the charge is baseless. Folks on the outside didn't have the resources that Denny Hastert and the congressional leadership had to get to the bottom of this. They had the pages in their midst. They had Mark Foley at every one of their leadership meetings. And most of all, they knew Mark Foley - they heard the rumors, they knew the talk of the hallways, they worked with him intimately for years. They had the advantage of knowing, unlike folks on the outside, that these emails were not occuring in a vacuum. Pages had been warned about Foley years ago, warned by the GOP staff themselves. No one on the outside knew this, but the GOP knew. They had all the opportunities to privately get to the truth that no one on the outside had. But they did nothing. Bush's FBI did nothing. And the scandal finally burst into the open.

The Republicans have decided that their latest "defense" to the child predator scandal is to claim that the issue is coming up now because Democrats have somehow orchestrated it. I wish. The issue is coming up now because Denny Hastert, John Boehner, John Shimkus, Tom Reynolds, and Rodney Alexander knew about this months and months and months ago, and did nothing about it.

It's a bit like someone who committed a murder last year, then hid the body, complaining that the authorities are only now finding the corpse. Uh, yeah. That's kind of the nature of a cover-up. You don't find out about it until after the crime. It's the height of hubris for the criminal to complain to the cops: How dare you catch me? But then again, what is today's Republican party but hubris in the face of wrongdoing.

It's ironic, and sad, that the Republicans found a child predator in their midst a year ago, did nothing about it, and now that the truth gets out they're claiming it's someone else's fault - yeah, someone else's fault that the truth got out, that's for sure. God knows, it sure isn't the Republican House leadership's fault that the truth got out. In that, they're 100% correct.