Mark Foley News

The official Mark Foley report is out. I'm reading it now. What's even more damaging is the Vanity Fair investigative piece. The article shows en effort by Dennis Hastert and Rodney Alexander.

After Representative Alexander was contacted by the St. Petersburg Times, he demanded to see exactly what his former page had sent Savoy—and he wanted it very quickly, judging by his staff's next actions. Savoy, who was home ill, was phoned by Alexander's press secretary, Adam Terry, who roused her from her sickbed so she could come to the office at once. Instead, she gave him her password, and the Foley e-mails were promptly ripped from her computer. (Savoy is quick to acknowledge that she is a registered Republican—contradicting Hastert's early response when the scandal erupted this past September, blaming "a lot of Democratic operatives" for the leak.)

And there is so much more.

Hastert, believing the leadership needed to present a united front, as one by one his colleagues were repudiating his foggy recollections, called a Republican-leadership meeting. That same day, an ethics-committee investigation was pressed for by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (over the objections of those who wanted an independent counsel), its purpose to discover who knew what when about Foley. Blunt, Boehner, and Reynolds were all summoned "to basically get their stories straight for the press," according to a knowledgeable source, who adds, "That to me is where Hastert attempted a cover-up."

Reynolds balked at having such a meeting. "This is stupid! We can't all go and meet privately and try to get our stories straight, because this matter was just referred to the ethics committee," he told Hastert, according to the same source. "In fact, none of us are supposed to be talking to each other, because we are not supposed to talk to potential witnesses." Worse, added Reynolds, "I can tell you anything we say at this leadership meeting is something we have to share with the ethics committee."

Melanie Sloan, of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told Vanity Fair that the FBI wanted no part in investigating Foley. The only good thing to happen from the Foley scandal was showing the public the lack of responsibility and accountability in Washington.

Update: Congressman Jim Kolbe received an email that Foley asked about a page's penis size. The page told the committee that Kolbe tried to shut him up about the email.

In approximately October 2001, while he was a freshman in college, the former Kolbe page told Foley in an IM conversation that his girlfriend was coming to visit him. While the former page can not recall the precise wording of the IM he received in response, he recalls that Rep. Foley made a reference to the size of his penis. According to the former Kolbe page, after consulting with his parents, he forwarded Foley's IM as an attachment to an e-mail directly to Rep. Kolbe through Rep. Kolbe's personal e-mail account. In his e-mail to Rep. Kolbe, the former Kolbe page explained that Rep. Foley had said something inappropriate to him and asked Rep. Kolbe to "take care of it." The former Kolbe page did not request any particular resolution, believing that such a request would be "presumptuous."