Oct 10 2006
Foleygate Timeline
More Updates Regarding Email Timeline and House Staff Names
Updates will be in bold as more details come in
Here is a fairly complete and accurate timeline on Foleygate compiled by AP. The key missing elements are the claims by Aravosis and Rogers on when they were attmepting to basically blackmail Fordham and when they got Fordham to ‘out’ Foley (their claims Fordham denies). We also need to add the July 28th appearance of the mystery website and the KoS commenter WHintern’s postings about Foley. So here is the more complete version from sources around the net such as Gateway Pundit and Mac Ranger and Radar On Line [additions from blog reporting entries and modifications in italics:
June 1997: Foley, a Florida Republican, reportedly writes sexually explicit instant messages to male ex-House Page Tyson Vivyan, who keeps the contacts a secret as he fends off Foley’s advances. Vivyan was 17 when the contacts begin, with the anonymous Foley making contact with Vivyan through Vivyan’s AOL account. [Note: corrected month from July to June]. 1998, 2000, 2002: Three new claims of sexual approaches by Foley towards ex-Pages between 17-18 years old as reported by ABC News. 2000-2001: Rep Jim Kolbe is notified of some questionable contacts by Foley with a Page and alerts House Clerk Jeff Trandahl and Foley’s Office (likely Kirk Fordham is notified as well). 2003: Foley reportedly writes sexually explicit instant messages to a male House page. Reporting shows this may be contact with an ex-Page right around his 18th birthday. May 2003: Foley faces questions about his sexual orientation as he prepares to run for a Senate seat in Florida. He later drops out of the race. Before January 2004: Foley’s chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, [allegedly] has conversations with senior aides in House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office “asking them to intervene” to address Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward pages, according to Fordham. January 2004: Fordham leaves Foley’s office. July 2004: John Aravosis claims Fordham was his source for outing Rep Foley as a gay (which possibly ended his Senate run). July 2004: Mike Rogers posts an open letter to Fordham demanding he explain why he is supporting Mel Martinez. March 2005: Mike Rogers posts a rant against Foley which includes claims of Foley’s misbehavior with young men and predicts a big political scandal preceding the 2006 elections. July 29, 2005: Folely makes first email contact with the Page from Louisianna, which makes the Page uncomfortable after some other emails (the other emails are not dated). Aug 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina hits LA. Aug 30-31, 2005: Louisianna Page contacts House Staffer (now known to be Danielle Savoy working for LA Rep Rodney Alexander) regarding Foley’s overtures, supposedly passes on email at this time. Sep 13, 2005: Foley emails to LA Page are printed off by someone, these will be sent to CREW in May of 2006 via Fax. Will also end up at ABC News at sometime in July-August 2006. Oct 17, 2005: Email exchange between LA Page and House Staffer (Ms Savoy) are printed off by someone, these will be sent to CREW in May of 2006 via Fax. Will also end up at ABC News at sometime in July-August 2006. Detailed, more accurate timeline of events created above Fall 2005: A former page contacts the office of his sponsor, Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., about e-mails he had received from Foley that asked about the boy’s age, then 16, and his birthday. Foley in one e-mail also requested a photo of the page.Fall 2005: Alexander’s chief of staff calls House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office about the e-mail exchange. Alexander’s aide declines to show the message to Hastert’s staff and to the clerk of the House, who administers the page program, but says it is not of a sexual nature and that the family simply wants the contact to stop. Hastert said last week he was not aware of “a different set of communications which were sexually explicit … which Mr. Foley reportedly sent another former page or pages.” Replaced by more accurate timeframe (November) in item below The clerk and Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., meet with Foley, who assures them he was only acting as a mentor to the boy. Shimkus, who chairs a House board that oversees the page program, orders Foley to cease contact with the boy and Foley agrees.Fordham, Foley’s former chief of staff, begins serving in the same capacity for Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Republican Campaign Committee. 10/17/05 – 11/30/05: Possible window for the leak of the emails to a man who then passes them around to news media outlets November 1-18th, 2005: Rep Shimkus and House Clerk Tandhal confront Foley with the emails, probably printed out from Alexander’s office, probably redacted to protect the Louisianna Page’s identity, and probably the version leaked to someone who shopped them to the news media. The range of dates is defined by Trandahl’s resignation as Clerk of The House. Nov 18, 2005: Jeff Trandahl resigns as Clerk of The House of Representatives to become Executive Director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation November 2005: The St. Petersburg Times says it assigned two reporters to investigate after being given copies of the e-mail exchange with the Louisiana teenager. The paper said Saturday it decided not to publish at the time because of the seriousness of what would be implied and because the boy and the family would not go on the record. The Miami Herald says it, too, had a copy of the e-mail but decided not to go public because the message was not sexually explicit and was subject to interpretation. Spring 2006: Alexander mentions the Foley situation to House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. Alexander says Boehner refers him to Reynolds. Both Boehner and Reynolds say they talk with Hastert about it. Boehner quotes Hastert as telling him the Louisiana page’s complaint “had been taken care of.” Hastert says later he doesn’t recall the meeting with Boehner and the speaker’s staff says he did not learn of it until much later. May 2006: Harpers magazine is provided the Foley Emails (and probably the Savoy emails) by a democrat operative who likely was the man who was leaked to during Oct-Nov 2005 period when the emails had to have been leaked. May 29, 2006: CREW receives the Foley communications between the LA Page and Hill Staffer, as well as the Foley emails – via Fax. [There may have been contact with CREW earlier in April according to the FBI]. July 2006: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington [CREW], a liberal leaning watchdog group, obtains copies of Foley’s e-mails and gives them to the FBI. The FBI says later the initial group of e-mails did not rise to the level of a federal offense. July 2006: The mysterious website stopsexpredators.blogspot.com is created and begins innocuous and minor postings on July 28th. July 2006: John Aravosis receives copies of the emails from someone, and was at the time informed CREW had the emails and had submitted them to the FBI – making it likely he and CREW had the same source. H/T Flopping Aces. August 2006: Brian Ross claims he firsts has access to the less worrisome emails and is too busy to deal with them (though one could read his claim as being to busy with Katrina as Fall of 2005). Sept 05: Commenter WHInternNow posts at DailyKOS prescient comments about Foley and his acts with “young boys” – apparently the first to really break the story – before the website sighted as the original source. Sept 21: Website Stop Sex Predators posts on emails supposedly coming into the site from people with stories about Mark Foley. Sept. 24: Website Stop Sex Predators posts scans of the innocuous emails from Foley to the 16 year old Page which was the focus of activity back in the fall of 2005. Supposedly only a few people in Congress and the new media have access to these emails at this point in time. A whole 12 minutes after the website posts the scans, WHInternNow is back posting the news at DailyKOS. With limited readership at the site one wonders at how quickly WHInternNow found the scanned emails. Sept. 28: ABC News reports on the e-mail exchange with the Louisiana teenager. Foley’s Democratic challenger, Tim Mahoney, calls for an investigation into the exchange. Sept 28: John Aravosis posts his reaction to the news and admits he had the emails “several months ago”, which times in well with the July submission of the emails by CREW to the FBI. Sept. 29: Revelations emerge of sexually explicit instant messages Foley sent in 2003 to former pages. Foley resigns. The House votes to refer the matter to the ethics committee. Sept. 29: Mike Rogers posts on the DCCC website congragulations on taking his Foley lead and running with it. His comments are summarily deleted from the DCCC website but Rogers posts them on his site to gloat. Sept. 30: Hastert says he is setting up a hot line for current and former pages and their families to report problems about the page program. Sept. 30: Hastert’s office releases the results of their preliminary review of events. Oct. 1: Hastert writes a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking for an investigation of Foley’s conduct. Hastert writes a similar letter to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. An FBI spokesman confirms the agency is “conducting an assessment to see if there’s been a violation of federal law.” Oct. 2: Foley’s attorney, David Roth, says the former congressman is battling alcoholism and has checked into a rehabilitation facility. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asks the Justice Department to investigate why the Foley e-mails they gave the FBI were not pursued. Oct. 3: The Washington Times calls in an editorial for Hastert to resign as speaker. Hastert says he won’t resign. President Bush says he supports Hastert’s call for an investigation and says he was “shocked and dismayed” at Foley’s behavior. Boehner talks about conferring with Hastert in the spring about Foley. Roth says at a news conference in West Palm Beach, Fla., that Foley was molested as a child by a member of the clergy but had never had sexual contact with a minor. He says Foley asked him to reveal publicly that Foley is gay. Oct. 4: Fordham announces he is resigning as Reynolds’ chief of staff and tells The Associated Press he had conversations with House leadership about Foley’s behavior prior to January 2004. The Justice Department orders the House to preserve Foley’s official computer files. A law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation says that FBI agents are interviewing participants in the House page program. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirms that it has begun its own preliminary inquiry into Foley’s e-mail contacts with House pages. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., calls for a group of former senators and others to investigate how the House handled the Foley matter. Oct 6: Drudge breaks the news that the sallacious IM messages from 2003 involving Jordan Edmund are not real, were a prank, and landed in the hands of Democrat operatives which set up the fake scandal.
If I missed some key event please let me know in the comments and I will add it. I believe there were more times when Rogers gloated. But one can see there was a lot of activity right around the time the story was timed to break – and before it did so!
Between March and fall of 2005 I think a disgruntled page tutor who was fired (by the Republican the now-identified IM recipient worked fo) contacted Mike Rogers with info about the IM’s. I don’t have time to investigate the whole thing but hope somebody does. See http://members.tripod.com/secretpage_1/
Good to see ya, AJ. I used to post on the Opinion Forum also.
me3150,
Thanks for the leads. What was your monicker at OP?
me3150
This is helpful. It is all so confusing.
I misspoke on an earlier post about what an article said.
But I corrected my misreading.
These young men Foley was approaching do clearly seem to be underaged.
At the same time, it looks like homosexual advocacy groups were hinting he was entertaining very young people.
Drudge is saying the famous IM was to an 18-year old.
Here is DRUDGE:
ABC ONLINE GLITCH LEADS TO IDENTITY OF FOLEY ACCUSER
FAMOUS IM EXCHANGE WAS WITH 18 YEAR OLD
Wed Oct 04 2006 20:32:06 ET
A posting on ABCNEWS.COM of an unredacted instant message sessions between Rep. Mark Foley and a former congressional page has exposed the identity of the now 21 year-old accuser.
The website PASSIONATE AMERICA detailed the startling exposure late Wednesday.
ABCNEWS said in a statement: “We go to great lengths to prevent the names of alleged sex crime victims from being revealed. On Friday there was a very brief technical glitch on our site which was overridden immediately.”
But the PASSIONATE AMERICA webmaster tells the OKLAHOMAN that “he stumbled onto the former page’s AOL screen name when looking at transcripts of the instant messages on ABC’s Web site Saturday. He said he typed a slightly-different Web address into his browser and found a version of the transcript with the screen name. He claims the AOL name of the young man was still on ABCNEWS.COM before he posted his story on Wednesday.
The AOL name of the young man was kept unredacted and housed on ABCNEWS.COM servers for 5 days! The information could be publicly accessed.
SEX CHAT WAS WITH 18 YEAR OLD
On Tuesday ABC news released a high-impact instant message exchange between Foley and, as ABC explained, a young man “under the age of 18.”
ABC headlined the story: “New Foley Instant Messages; Had Internet Sex While Awaiting House Vote”
But upon reviewing the records, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned, the young man was in fact over the age of 18 at the time of the exchange.
A network source explains, messages with the young man and disgraced former Congressman Foley took place before and after the 18th birthday.
Developing…
I have read that Fordham also worked for/with David Corn.
I can’t tell when the fired tutor posted the site I linked to. He was fired in June of 2003, applied to be a science teacher but lost out to a different guy who was fired a year later. I’m wondering if the tutor contacted Rogers in the summer of 2004, which helped Rogers be able to say that more would come out at election time.
me3150,
I do believe I recall you – though that was years ago now. I go back occassionally, but this blog takes all my free time.
This blog is a service to us all. I’ve watched how the blogs have worked together to pitch in their research and I admire the diligence. I truly believe that the prostitution of our media is the number one security risk for this country. They’re acting just like the Islamists – immediate hysterical demands for the death of whoever they libel. Either we stand up for accuracy, or else our libel, perjury, and election laws mean zip. That’s what Foleygate is about.
I get spitting mad when I think about the way John Murtha libelled our soldiers in Haditha – all because of a terrorist “photojournalist” for Reuters. Or how Afghanistan had a great election only to fall back into anti-American terrorism when Gitmo prisoners used our media to falsely accuse the soldiers of committing the crime that THEY actually committed: Quran desecration.
As a nation we HAVE to expose the corrupt media, or we are toast.
I’ve given this a lot of thought over the last few days, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the only thing important that has happened is:
As always, the scheming, lying, anti American Democrats are playing politics as usual. They come out with something explosive about the Republicans, the Republicans over-react(as the Democrats planned)
The Republicans (being the moral persons in the situation) crucify themselves and as planned, the Dems come out ahead in the elections.
Their vehicle for this escapade: Gay Republicans preying on young people.
Ah, as they play it. The Repubs KNEW about this(and that’s worse than the fact the Dems knew about it)
And then, ahhh… A repub is gay. It’s only okay for Dems to be Gay.
Gay Repubs are bad because they aren’t Dems. so they aren’t entitled to civil rights(like privacy).
Gay Repubs should be exposed because they’re bad.(because Repubs aren’t supposed to be gay)
NONE OF THIS IS ABOUT WHAT WENT ON….. IT’S ONLY POLITICS. DON’T OVERLOOK THE TREES WHILE LOOKING FOR THE FOREST.
The Dems DON’T care that a gay guy preyed on a page. It is only a political opportunity for them.
They want to protect the pages. Ha. They want to EXPLOIT them and the situation for POLITICAL gain.
They want power and they don’t care what it takes to get it.
They will betray the troops, they will aid and abet the terrorists.
Hell, they would prove their Dad assaulted a 16 yr old female page if they thought they could get political power from it.
Get it? They are low life’s that would sink to any level to accomplish the goals of getting power back so they can then tax and giveaway YOUR money.
Stick together Conservatives and Repubs, don’t let the liberals and progressives(formerly called communists and socialists) get their way.
AJ
A slight quibble with the 12 minute later posting by WhIntern at Kos
We don’t know the time zones of each server, that could have an effect on the gap calculation if the time zones are different
This disgruntled kid says at his secret page that he is now going to a ‘progressive school’. This may be a wild goose chase, but someone might want to check to see if he went to any school associated with:
http://www.hmi.org/
It is a school for gay and transgendered kids in new york
(according to Mike Roger’s resume he worked there back in 97)
I know it does not fit the time the kid might have been there, but Mike Rogers is very involved in gay issues and may still be involved in the school or other so-called ‘progressive schools’.
opps..my bad..he says he TEACHES at a progressive school! What is this ‘kid’s’ name? Does anyone know?
If so…go check out this school and see if he still works there:
http://www.hmi.org/
I would do it myself but am busy researching another aspect of this matrix of lies. Let me know if anything pans out.
REMEMBER: THIS SCHOOL IS LISTED ON MIKE ROGERS RESUME!!!
Just a thought
If you go from his moniker WhInternNow and take it as a fact, it would be nice to know which current white house interns are ex pages. Is this a normal progression?
I would presume that a page would then go to college, in fact I have a caputured image of the pagealumni site listing who was going to which college after the term.
So by that the graduate would then apply for the internship
Seems like it would be a small number who fit that bill
Your previous Allen post doesn’t display AJ html glitch?
The Foley Scandal, Part One Billion…
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 …
MasturGATE. A political “plum” the way Monica Lewinsky was a “find.”
It’s not going to play out as imagined. Because it taps into something that’s clearly in the mainstream. Gays don’t have a ticket to same-sex marriage.
But some real, radical, GAY, DNC players, thought they’d get the religious conservative base to “go nuts.” And, so they threw a 21 year old, the Jordan Edmund, at Hastert.
Hastert isn’t going to lose his job over THIS.
And, ya just never know if the donks will gain anything at the ballot boxes on November 7th.
While the FBI has problems of its own. Today, we know that the #2 guy in the FBI, working with Woodward, with secret meetings on par with how gays “connect” to one another; shared information that took Nixon down. And, made Woodward a millionaire.
This time? Woodward’s book is bombing. And, it came out the same day of this MasturGATE scandal. The donks have yet to prove that lanugage puts people in the same category as “child” molesters. Because they can’t make their argument on “child.”
As a matter of fact, in the backfire, the republicans look TOLERANT. And, the democraps look, again, to be peeing over a voting block of their own.
But we have to wait for November 8th to be sure.
Now, the “Jordan Edmund” is the wreckage to look for, should the donks fail to convince voters this issue was worth all the hullabaloo.
This is ABC’s FREAK SHOW. And, “October Surprise.”
NBC got their’s with RatherGATE.
Dan Rather didn’t see it coming, either.
Who had the userid and password for the Maf54 AOL account?…
“I just saw Major Garrett on Brit Hume. He had a reporter that said he was shocked to see Maf54 log on to AIM today! The reporter tried to slip in a quick question, but Maf54 logged off.†-Sarah Green, Macsmind Comments Section
I brought this poin…
According to the Free Republic, Edmunds made a post to the page board pointing out the ABC story within minutes of it being released.
Assuming the times are correct, that implies that Edmunds knew the story was coming, which means that ABC had already spoken to him, which means that they are lying when they say that they did not know of the IM’s until after they published the emails.
Re Patrick W’s post above.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1714978/posts?page=252#252
I posted on FreeRepublic (my name there is PghBaldy, Baldy is how I started on LGF) the info about Jordan Edmund’s post on the USHPAA website. I was confused by the times, so I contacted Mathew Loraditch, the site owner. He said it was Eastern TimeZone. So, Jordan posted the link to ABC’s news
jordanedmund Sep 28 2006, 02:12 PM Post #1
Ultimate Page
Group: CLASS0102
Posts: 272
Joined: —
From: Oklahoma City, OK
Member No.: 3
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/0…enyearold *****ABC story was dated 306pm Sept 28. Though not sure if ABC upddated, and changed times, or if Google cache gave me different timezones. THAT said, Jordan appears the one who broke the news of FoleyGate to the pageboard – now he seemed to be important there…still not sure if it’s important Google cache of USHPAA board
http://tinyurl.com/gesen
Don’t know if it’s important, but as PatrickW says above, Jordan Edmund posted aboput the story at 212pm 9/28 and ABC broke at 306pm 9/28. I contacted Mathew Loraditch to get the timezone for the USHPAA board, and it’s ET. Here is my post with the links etc (also see my post below this one on FreeRepublic): http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1714978/posts?page=252#252