Good work Clarice. The blogosphere should be able to close this mystery quite soon. Trandahl and Fordham seemed to have both tired of covering for Foley (both being gay and not wanting the stigma of child predator to stick to them) and may have done something very stupid – like try to get Foley away from Pages by giving the scandalous information to the Democrats and his opponent. It would be an interesting way of removing Foley from access to the Pages since Trandahl and Fordham had bothed moved on to positions where they could no longer control him. And the media played the useful idiots – as usual.

Two sources close to Trandahl told CNN that he had been monitoring Foley’s interaction with pages after being told of troubling behavior by the congressman in the House cloakroom and elsewhere. Trandahl took his concerns to Kirk Fordham, Foley’s former chief of staff, many times, the sources said.

Fordham testified last week that he warned House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s chief of staff, Scott Palmer, at least three years ago about Foley’s conduct, according to a source familiar with Fordham’s version of events.

Palmer has denied Fordham’s account.

Fordham and Trandahl handled the concern of Rep Kolbe with Foley’s activities with the Pages in 2000. Fordham and Trandahl handled the Page emails last fall. Fordham and Trandahl handled the drunk Foley at the Page dorm incident. And now Trandahl is expanding the list of events to cover incidents in the cloak room, which he discussed with Fordham. In fact, contrary to CNN’s reporting, Fordham apparently testified that he covered for Foley for a decade. Now the problem here is Jeff Trandahl is part of the House Leadership. So he can say the House Leadership knew because he knew. But if he and Fordgham were putting out Foley’s fires for years, because as gay staffers they had some warped interest in Foley not being discovered and branding all gays on the Hill, then we have a situation where the leadership did not know. Notice that the Page email issues has a paper trail. Does anyone think making a complaint that a sitting member of Congress was a sexual predator of children would NOT create a paper trail? Trandahl and Fordham need to bring out some physical evidence of their claims, or else we can all reasonably conclude they are hiding their own cover up.

As House clerk, Mr. Trandahl had a rare bird’s-eye view of what was occurring beneath the Capitol dome As a gay Republican, he also had a window into a subculture not widely discussed within his party.

Although he never dwelled on his sexuality, he also did not go to extreme lengths to conceal it, unlike Mr. Foley, who publicly acknowledged he is gay only after resigning this month.

Mr. Trandahl, 42, has told friends he was not a social friend of Mr. Foley and did not jeopardize pages’ safety. He has declined to discuss the case publicly while it remains under investigation by the ethics committee and the F.B.I., which is trying to determine whether Mr. Foley broke laws by exchanging sexually explicit messages with current and former pages.

…

For seven years, Mr. Trandahl oversaw more than 300 employees, a $20 million budget and House functions. He also supervised the page program. And in the conflicting accounts and varying recollections about when Republican leaders learned of Mr. Foley’s conduct, it is Mr. Trandahl who seems interwoven at each step along the way.

…

As clerk, Mr. Trandahl supervised the page program. So concerns involving their conduct were routed to him. Most every year, he sent at least some pages home for drinking alcohol, smoking marijuana or simply misbehaving.

…

Over the years, people who worked with him on the Hill said, Mr. Trandahl received periodic complaints that Mr. Foley was acting too friendly to the pages or interns.

The House ethics committee is trying to determine whether Mr. Trandahl simply passed along the information to Kirk Fordham, a longtime aide to Mr. Foley, or whether he alerted the speaker’s office that Mr. Foley’s overfriendly behavior had grown beyond idle gossip.

Reporting to date tends to indicate Trandahl and Fordham intercepted the complaints, gave the impression actions were being taken, faced Foley with the complaints only to get another promise to behave, and then allowed the issues to die. But something changed. Fordham reportedly decided to ‘break’ with Foley to get him to stop. He was tired of a decade of covering for Foley.

What is becoming clear is a concerted effort over years to reign in Foley quietly suddenly became a political weapon that was shopped to DNC Donors and the press before breaking out in a coordinated media campaign (all according to Democrat sources). So much for a GOP scandal.

Allegations of improper conduct toward teenage congressional assistants, which do not involve ex-Rep. Mark Foley, were discussed by the board overseeing the program, a Democratic lawmaker said.

Rep. Dale Kildee, the only Democrat on the House Page Board, would not elaborate on whether the discussion involved lawmakers. He said, however, that none of the allegations discussed have been proven.

Wait a minute here! I emphasized that last bit to highlight the hypocrisy in all this. There are other complaints about unwanted approaches towards the Pages, but they have not been proven? From what we saw iin the emails (not the IMs) was clearly insufficient to prove anything. So did Kildee propose to investigate these incidents?

Kildee said the House Page Board held the discussions about allegations of improper conduct in a conference call.

“It was about other allegations and I’d like to leave it at that,” he said. “Let me just say, not about Mr. Foley. It’s only been allegations.”

No Sir! We will not just “leave it at that”! All that existed in the Fall of 1005 with Foley was some emails asking a Page how he was doing after Katrina and if he would send Foley a picture. Who are these people Kioldee is covering for (given his party affiliation, we can only guess). We must, as the Democrats have been crying, protect the children and find out if they are being exposed to sexual predators. I want to know how these other charges compared to the Foley evidence. Were they more or less obvious? Were they also being covered up (to protect the accused from unfounded rumors – of course!). We need more on this to make sure other predators are not still on the Hill and hunting their prey among the Pages there.

[I hope someone like Rush sees this news - it needs to get broad exposure]

Matt Foreman, executive director of the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force, described the response to the Foley scandal as “shockingly homophobic.” He objected to what he characterized as anti-gay remarks about the scandal by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan and the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins.

“The GOP leadership and their supporters are trying to deflect blame by making gay people scapegoats,” Foreman said.

…

Tony Smith, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Miami, said the tactic of pointing blame at gays “is not working” and is not likely to have a lasting effect on public attitudes.

“The pivot point for the story is the Republican leadership allegedly protecting a predator,” Smith said. “I think that’s overwhelming the sexual orientation aspect of it. I don’t see any indication that there’s going to be an anti-gay backlash. Republicans have tried to make it that, but I don’t think it’s working.”

Foreman said he is most concerned about anti-gay activists claiming that gays are disproportionately involved in pedophilia, which he referred to as a false statement “that leads to violence and discrimination.”

Of course there is an anti-gay backlash! A gay man has been found hunting the halls of the Page program looking for partners once they get out of HS and are legal prey. This is the worse stereotype possible for gays. But this was not brought on by the House Leadership! The GOP is known for standing side-by-side with the Boy Scouts and their restrictions on openly gay Scout Masters. (Truth is, no adult should be disclosing any sexual context to a minor – gay or otherwise). It is the liberal ACLU standing with NAMBLA and their goal of making what Foley was doing LEGAL. That is why putting this scandal at the feet of the GOP is a joke and just not working.

What is absolutely clear here is conservative/republican gays were afraid Foley’s actions would create the kind of gay backlash the Foley news did create. And this is why they spent in one case a decade hiding the facts, before ‘breaking’ with Foley – supposedly to force him to stop. The Foley scandal is about a community of gays under fire from right and left who made terrible decisions to keep either side from skewering them. It is a story of revenge as possibly one of these two men, Kirk Fordham, may have leaked the LA Page emails to democrat operatives who shopped them around news organizations, used them to crack open donors wallets, fed them to Foley’s challenger who had them in the Spring, and used them to coordinate an October surprise. This scandal is about bad decisions to coverup the acts of one demented person, revenge and political dirty tricks by an idea-bankrupt party. Interestingly, it doesn’t involve the GOP one bit, except that the demented person and his blocking guards were from the GOP side of the Hill.

One night a few years ago, Rep. Mark Foley reportedly showed up at the dormitory for House pages, a brick building a few blocks from the Capitol. It’s unclear what Foley wanted, but staffers believed he was drunk and turned him away.
A day or two later, House Clerk Jeff Trandahl called Foley’s chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, and told him about the incident. Trandahl asked Fordham to speak with his boss about it.

…

Fordham, Foley’s top political adviser and chief of staff until late 2003, has said he was always wary about his employer’s contacts with younger men.
Foley was gay but did not want to reveal his sexuality because of political considerations. Yet he could be unusually bold on Capitol Hill. He invited gay friends to visit his office and was especially friendly with young male staffers.
Fordham said that bothered him. He said he was concerned people would see Foley with young men. The men appeared to be in their 20s, creating an impression that Fordham says he believed was inappropriate for a congressman who at the time was in his late 40s. Fordham repeatedly warned Foley to be careful about appearances, but the congressman did not heed the advice.
The same went for the attention he showered on underage pages.
About five years ago, long before the dorm incident, Fordham got a call from Trandahl, who said he was concerned about Foley’s contacts with pages. Trandahl asked Fordham to discuss it with Foley, and he did.
Some time later, Trandahl called again with the same request. Fordham has said the calls from Trandahl were prompted by Foley’s overly friendly behavior with the pages. Fordham has said he saw nothing to indicate Foley was making sexual advances toward the boys.
Fordham again talked with Foley about the behavior but, once again, Foley did not follow his advice.

Note that all these contacts are between Fordham and Trandahl. And from the NY Times we leanr Fordham tired of a ‘decade’ of covering for Foley and ‘broke’ with him to try and get him to stop. I think we know who leaked the emails between Oct 17 and Nov 30th, 2005 to Democrat operatives. It was Fordham at least. The question is how did he get the emails that were in Trandahl’s possession and probably redacted by Rod Alexander’s staff – the represtentative of the LA Page in the emails. A redaction that is common to both the CREW versions and ABC News versions of the documents. We are getting closer to solving this puzzle.

]]> http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2705/feed 6 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2704 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2704#comments Sun, 15 Oct 2006 14:07:03 +0000 AJStrata http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2704 Frank Davies at the San Jose Mercury News has produced an interesting, first hand recollection of Mark Foley that also shows how people who intimately knew Foley had no idea he had predatory tendencies towards minors (I am being reasonably cautious in my representation of Foley’s acts until we get something more concrete, as is proper in our legal system). Davies paints a picture of a really interesting and engaging person in Foley, which is probably how he was able to hide his problems so well:

And there was a bonus in dealing with Mark Foley. He was a great storyteller and the life of the party, who unabashedly loved the limelight where politics and celebrity mix. He did dead-on impersonations of Bill Clinton and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But in the end, we see the same pattern as has been presented by House leadership – the revelations of the hidden Foley were completely unexpected. And Davies admits that good will built up by Foley was useful in initially deflecting the natural concern one would have when faced with the initial, questionable emails:

And then last year, some of my colleagues at the Herald were given the initial, “overly friendly” e-mails Foley sent to a former page. The St. Petersburg Times and Harper’s magazine had the same information. The publications did some digging, but it did not yield much more — certainly not the explicit sexual messages revealed later. Editors decided not to go with a story based only on e-mails whose meaning, as Herald editor Tom Fiedler put it, was “ambiguous.”

Putting “gay” and “predator” in the same sentence reinforces ugly stereotypes, but it’s clear some journalists knew enough to pursue this story more vigorously. Foley had asked the former page for his picture, and the boy thought the e-mails were “sick.” Editors later conceded that because Foley was seen as a “good guy,” perhaps they gave him the benefit of the doubt and didn’t dig very deeply.

What is inconsistently wrong in this articles is the concept those attempting to ‘out’ Foley were Republicans. This and many other blogs have linked many times to Mike Rogers and John Aravosis personal claims and open threats to ‘out’ Foley and his Chief of Staff, Kirk Fordham. And as the Foleygate Timeline we generated illustrates, Rogers was predicting this scandal would hit around the same time the emails were being leaked to Democrat operatives in Oct-Nov 2005. So it was really far left liberal Democrats who were pushing to ‘out’ Foley and other gay Hill staffers. Of course there is another falsehood being reported here:

In the digital era, the story broke in a less traditional way. The first e-mails, posted on a “stop predators” blog, led to a story on ABC News that revealed the damaging messages that forced Foley’s resignation — all in less than 24 hours.

We now know that those versions of the emails were forged mock-ups, which any 6th grader could see when comparing them to the versions put out by CREW and ABC News. Why the media is not interested in how they were duped (again) by forged documents implies they do not care about the quality of their reporting. And this is further emphasized in the fact bloggers and some news outlets have been able to dig much deeper into the Democrat parties orchestration of this media frenzy. From the shopping of the emails to news outlets and democrat donors to the fact operatives admit Foley’s challenger had the emails and sat on them and other operatives admit they had planned to release this stink bomb closer to the elections, there is little doubt those who knew and held the evidence of a Foley problem were the media and the democrat operatives behind this scandal. But the media cannot face the fact they were duped and used. So they fail to report because it is too painful to face how easy it is to manipulate the press. Too bad, it is this fact that has made the press less credible than both parties.

]]> http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2704/feed 8 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2700 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2700#comments Sat, 14 Oct 2006 13:41:37 +0000 AJStrata http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2700 The media frenzy over Foley has created the worst case of herd mentality I have ever seen in the liberal media. The analogy to cows just followin the tail in front of them is apt in this case, because the media has lost all perspective. For example, if Foley’s staff was unaware of Foley’s acts and the so called warning signs (except Kirk Fordham of course, who has now admitted he ‘broke’ with Foley to get him to stop doing what he was doing after covering for him for 10 years), then how is it anyone would expect Hastert and the Leadership to know about Foley? These people worked with him for years on a day-to-day basis, and yet the FBI is finding no one had an inkling about his predatory behavior?

One former Foley staffer said the agents are attempting to determine if Foley’s contact with underage pages went beyond exchanges of sexually explicit e-mails and instant messages to actual physical encounters.

Several former staffers have told ABC News they were unaware of Foley’s activities

If no one but Fordham and Trandahl knew about Foley’s actions, then it is abundantly clear they were covering up for him and trying to get him back on track. And I hate to say it, but Fordham sounds more and more like the jilted lover. He covered for the man for 10 years, then leaves and decides to ‘break’ with him to get him to stop? [One can only imagine the 'break' was the leak]. But yet he tried to intervene with ABC News right up to the end? That is a strange thing to do if you are trying to get the person to stop misbehaving.

]]> http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2700/feed 3 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2697 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2697#comments Fri, 13 Oct 2006 20:50:30 +0000 AJStrata http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2697 I could care less how far Ken Silversteen of Harpers Magazine attempts to bend over backwards in order to not understand what he is writing, but since his first admission a Democrat operative was the one shopping the Foley email story from November of 2005, he has become convinced there are more Democrat fingerprints on the withholding of this story, and they had hopes to damage Foley politically, if not the Republicans as well. Again, through all of this one has to wonder why one stop for this story was not the FBI and the House Ethics Committee.

As I wrote on Tuesday, the source brought the story to other news outlets late in 2005, and brought it to me in May. Why would he try to spring an October Surprise a year early?

I have no evidence that the source was working in concert with the national Democratic Party. That said, I acknowledged in the story that some Democratic officials may well have been aware of the accusations against Foley and expected supporting evidence to come out in the press. Since writing the original article, I’ve become convinced that was in fact the case; indeed, several well-placed sources have told me that some Democrats—and certainly people affiliated with the campaign of Foley’s Democratic challenger Tim Mahoney—were aware of the accusations at least as early as late Spring.

How much clearer is this? Foley’s challenger knew in Spring of 2006 Foley was a supposed danger to kids in the Page program (according to how the Democrats and media tell the story). So why did he and his campaign leave the risk out there? Why not expose Foley right away? Answer:Political Strategy. Timing the story may allow Foley to snag another kid or two, but timing the story’s release would give Democrats something much more – POWER!

It’s quite possible these parties knew well before then, and were planning accordingly. As Ralph McGaughey, a conservative from Boston, pointed out to me in an email, before the scandal broke, Foley was almost guaranteed to win re-election. In 2004 George Bush won handily over John Kerry in Foley’s conservative district, and the congressman’s last two Democratic challengers only raised about $60,000—total. Meanwhile, Foley was sitting on a vast campaign war chest and had a reputation as a formidable fundraiser.

And yet Mahoney has been able to raise more than $1.1 million for his campaign.

I checked campaign-finance records and found that Mahoney himself provided about half of that amount. But he also pulled in $80,000 from heavily Democratic labor-union PACs and raised about $455,000 from individual donors. What’s more interesting is that some of that money started coming in late last year—around the time that the Foley emails were given to reporters in Florida—and some of Mahoney’s biggest donors were from out of state. The donors include major Democratic donors like John Gorman of Austin-based Tejas, the New York based construction mogul John Tishman, and the Massachusetts-based real estate tycoons Gerald and Elaine Schuster, who have a history of anti-labor and slumlord practices. These campaign finance records certainly suggest that Democrat officials expected Foley’s seat would be in play and quietly steered donors in Mahoney’s direction.

After reporting the obvious message of a cash strapped Democrat party sending large campaign donations to a sure fire losing race, and all that entails in terms of discussions and guarantees the money will be a wise investment, Sliversteen still cannot see the forest for the trees right in front of him. But those of us who are not blinded by BDS and partisanship sure can. To get money to flow is always hard. To get money to flow to what looks like a wasted effort is impossible, unless the effort will not be a waste. The fact the money is flowing about the same time the emails were leaked (10/17-11/30/05) means those emails must have been useful to pry open some donor’s wallets.

Silversteen also cannot understand what an easy alibi he and the early efforts with the St Peterburg Times could make an October surprise. We all know the LA Page emails are not enough to make a scandal. But if only some sources knew about the IMs (which were also in the hands of a Democrat Operative) then one could establish an alibi through a series of media rejections of the benign, half story. This scenario is so easy to understand it is amazing Silversteen cannot see it, except it would mean acknowledging how he was played like a fiddle. As he points out in the piece, all sources have agendas and intentions.

Silversteen even notes how quickly the second shoe (or second act) dropped when ABC finally did post the emails that everyone else on the planet felt were nothing:

ABC decided to publish, which meant that sources (including one die-hard Republican former-page) immediately sent ABC the lethal IMs.

And we all know the stories about how Jordan Edmund, the Republican who was the former Page with the IMs. In fact, I recall (but cannot find) some claim Edmund posted a comment about the ABC News story right around the time it came out – making the timing of all of this suspect. It is quite possible still, that this was a well orchestrated event. But no one once referred this to police? To the Ethics Committee? That is why this looks so rotten. All these Democrat operatives and fundraisers and stories not published – until one month from the election. Not to mention the reporting by The Prowler regarding comments by ANOTHER democrat operative that the timing was thrown off by the sinking poll numbers for Dems.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that if the Dems wanted this out, the next questions was how to maximize its impact. Somehow that little bit of logical deduction escapes the gullible Mr. Silversteen.

]]> http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2697/feed 6 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2696 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2696#comments Fri, 13 Oct 2006 20:16:21 +0000 AJStrata http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2696 The drive by media is so obsessed by the Foley scandal they apparently are unaware of the Reid scandal exploding. But they are also missing some key reporting in the Foley scandal as well – since of course the news doesn’t implicate Republicans but relates to a prediction I made a while back that Fordham and Trandahl, both conservative gays, had attempted for years to cover for Foley and force him to back away when he let his desires overrun his judgement. The gay conservatives or workers for conservatives naturally feel a lot of pressure to excel and to never let one of theirs fall into a stereotype ripe for gay bashing. So I am not surprised all signs lead to fellow gays trying to corral Foley when he went off course.

The NY Times is reporting that a source close to Fordham has some interesting revelations on what Fordham may have testified about yesterday:

A person close to the inquiry who is sympathetic to Mr. Fordham said that Mr. Fordham decided to break his loyalties to Mr. Foley, a Florida Republican whose political career he had protected and scripted for a decade, in hope of getting his boss to change his behavior. The person agreed to speak about the matter, which is under investigation by federal prosecutors and by the House, only on the condition of anonymity.

Emphasis mine. It is clear here that Fordham was in constant damage control relating to Foley’s sexual appetites. There is no other way to read this. Ten years ago is 1996, and I believe Foley was first elected in 1994. So was the decade up in 2004, 2005 or 2006? Either way, the ‘break’ in loyalties is well timed with the exposure of this story. We know Trandahl and Foley knew of the LA Page email issue from the fall of 2005. Is it possible that Fordham, when he learned through the rumor mill about another event with Foley, finally said enough was enough and helped get the emails to a Democrat operative in the period Oct 17-Nov 30, 2005? This ‘break” wording is quite intriguing.

Mr. Fordham has said he discreetly told Scott Palmer, Mr. Hastert’s chief of staff, about a pattern of Mr. Foley’s behavior.

The person sympathetic to Mr. Fordham said that one incident had pushed Mr. Fordham into action after years in which he heard minor complaints about Mr. Foley’s conduct. The person said that Jeff Trandahl, then the House clerk, had told Mr. Fordham that Mr. Foley, who seemed drunk, had gone to the pages’ dormitory near the Capitol after hours.

Mr. Palmer denies receiving a warning about Mr. Foley. Mr. Trandahl has declined to comment, saying he will save his remarks for investigators.

OK, but telling Palmer Foley was drunk outside the Page dorms is not the same thing as telling Palmer Foley was drunk and looking for some young sex outside the Page dorms. I made this point before as well – a drunk Congressman is not a shocking event on Capitol Hill. My bet is Shimkus testified that whatever Fordham said, it did not imply sexual predation on Pages. But we still have this undertone that Fordham had to expose Foley to get him to stop his actions. The drive-by media is so focused on the Hastert angle they don’t even comprehend what they are writing.

Mr. Fordham’s testimony rests at the center of what investigators are trying to determine. The notion that he is, essentially, testifying against the word of Mr. Hastert and his closest aides underscores how the page scandal has upended the midterm election campaign and created unlikely political casualties.

I have seen nothing to indicate Fordham rang alarm bells about Foley in the sense he was a sexual predator. We know Kolbe didn’t do more than tell Trandahl and Foley (and probably Fordham) in 2000, the previous time Foley was out of control. This looks like Fordham got tired of toeing the line for Foley and Trandahl and leaked on Foley. Of course, if he really was concerned about Foley’s actions then he could have taken this all to the FBI and Dennis Hastert himself – not to Democrat operatives who started shopping the story to the media. That is not how you report a potential crime.

]]> http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2696/feed 1 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2686 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2686#comments Thu, 12 Oct 2006 21:51:20 +0000 AJStrata http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2686 It seems that the earlier warnings about Rep Mark Foley and Pages had nothing to do about salacious emails or IMs, had nothing to do with concerns about sexual predation by Foley on the Pages, had nothing to do about sex. They were about being DRUNK!

The source said Fordham was to say he notified Scott Palmer, Hastert’s chief of staff, three or four years ago about a report that Foley had shown up drunk at the dormitory that houses the teenage messengers.

Emphasis mine. Notice how CNN has to add in their 20/20 hindsight spotter’s scope by getting the word ‘messengers’ into the sentence. Of course the event, if it happened, had nothing to do with IMs and emails. In fact, it would be hard to make this about anything but a drunk congressman. It is only in the light of all we have learned about Foley that we can even sense a tenuous connection. The BDS driven media sees conspiracies and corruption everywhere, so they don’t even need a connection most times! But this is just plain dumb. It seems to me Fordham re-assessed his position when having to go under oath, so he cleaned up his claim – making it pointless. It is about as relevant as saying “Foley smiled at a page”.

]]> http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2686/feed 8 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2681 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2681#comments Wed, 11 Oct 2006 14:50:49 +0000 AJStrata http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2681 Blogger For The Loop has done us all a favor by posting the two versions of the faked up emails that were posted on the Stop Sex Predators (SSP) website. and by John Aravosis (radical leftist). Note that these ‘creations’ have no dates in the headers (which means they are not emails). Comparing them to the versions at CREW or ABC News shows they have all the right words, but the punctuation, spacing and wrapping is all off. The subject lines are off too. The original email from Foley does look like the same one as the original source versions. Someone dictated the contents of the emails to SSP, and Aravosis got a copy of them. Of course Aravosis claims to have been in contact with CREW when he got his forged versions. This is one of the more intriguing aspects of this weird case: why would ABC News and others refer to faked up versions at SSP when they had the originals???

]]> http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2681/feed 14 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2679 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2679#comments Wed, 11 Oct 2006 14:21:45 +0000 AJStrata http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2679 Der Spiegel has an article out claiming ‘the list’ of gay republican staffers and officials on The Hill is a REPUBLICAN attack on gays in their party!

The scandal surrounding US Congressman Mark Foley’s inappropriate messages to a teenage boy threaten to damage Republican chances in a tight midterm election next month. Faced with a disaster at the polls, the GOP has begun fighting back with mounting ferocity — including a witch hunt against gays.

They just call it “the list.” It supposedly bears the names of two dozen gay and lesbian Republicans — including a female Senator, four members of Congress, nine chiefs of staff, and two White House advisors. This “velvet mafia,” say inside sources, helped cover up former US Congressman Mark Foley’s appetite for underage congressional pages — in order to protect one of their own.

Maybe it would help the Vogel-Kopfs (”bird brains” if my HS Deutsch is still in my memory correctly) if they did some investigating instead of slandering. “The List” is from fanatic leftwing nutjobs using blackmail and extortion to try and influence votes and policy. The outing campaign is the liberal answer to their lack of ideas and communication skills. Der Spiegel better retract this abysmal attempt at ‘reporting’.

]]> http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2679/feed 2 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2678 http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2678#comments Wed, 11 Oct 2006 04:37:13 +0000 AJStrata http://strata-sphere.com/blog/index.php/archives/2678 Welcome: Welcome Hugh Hewitt and Townhall readers. For those interested in this subject I have compiled a Timeline of Events that has been developed from many bloggers following this story. All my posts on Foleygate can be found here. End

It’s about time. Once again the blogosphere is doing the detailed analysis and the antique media is playing catch up. Today the WaPo finally realizes there is more to the story than has been reported, and much is coming from the media themselves:

But there are indications that Democrats spent months circulating five less insidious Foley e-mails to news organizations before they were finally published by ABC News late last month, which prompted the leaking of the more salacious instant messages. Harper’s Magazine said yesterday that it obtained the five e-mails from a Democratic Party operative, albeit in May, long before the election season.

And they sat on them. As did the St Petersburg Times and many other media outlets. All the while none alerted the House leadership or law enforcement. And we are to believe all these media outlets and the democrat operative shopping them were concerned about the Pages?

But new information suggests that the story of the release of Foley’s communications with male ex-pages is more complicated than either side asserts.

The most sexually explicit material — the instant messages that forced Foley’s abrupt resignation on Sept. 29 and turned his actions into a full-fledged scandal — appears to be disconnected from politics. The two former pages who revealed the correspondence to ABC News and The Washington Post, however, may never have come forward had Democratic operatives not divulged the five more benign e-mails that Foley had sent to a Louisiana boy.

Again, more confirmation from WaPo that (a) a Democrat operative was the source of the less salacious emails and (b) this story was shopped from November 2005 to August 2006. And even then the WaPo is somehow working off an erroneous timeline. The very first Foley email is the one where he asks “Do I have the right email?” and is dated July 29, 2005 – not 2004 as the post ‘reports’. It is this kind of simple misreporting which has been the hallmark of this entire scandal. The WaPo is trying to claim their Dem Operative source is not the same earlier source, based on more misreporting on the custody of the emails coming from a Rep congressional office to the democrat operative(s):

Silverstein said his source was a “Democratic operative,” the same source that had provided the e-mail exchanges to the St. Petersburg Times in November 2005. Both the magazine and the paper declined to publish a story. But the source “was not working in concert with the national Democratic Party,” Silverstein added. “This person was genuinely disgusted by Foley’s behavior, amazed that other publications had declined to publish stories about the emails, and concerned that Foley might still be seeking contact with pages.”

A second source emerged, however, just last month, peddling the e-mails to several other publications, including The Post. And Ross of ABC News has stressed that his initial source was a Republican.

By my count that makes 2 Democrat operatives peddling this story, and not notifying authorities who could take action to protect the Pages. But the WaPo has to admit their source was intent on harming Reps – so why did they not report this fact sooner?

Two of the primary sources who delivered the instant messages came forward this week to clarify their motives. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear that exposure would leave them open to harassment, especially from bloggers.

One of ABC News’s sources, a former page, said he went public with his knowledge of the instant messages on Sept. 29 only after the network, the day before, published the questionable e-mails that Foley had sent to the Louisiana boy. The former page and current college student stressed that he is a “staunch Republican” who “wouldn’t vote for a Democrat ever.” He also said that he is not calling for the resignation of Hastert or any other Republican leader.

“I in no way knew or intended to have all the brouhaha about what the GOP leadership knew and when they knew it,” he said in a detailed e-mail to The Post. “Truthfully, I am very troubled about what it seems has gone on behind the scenes, but that in no way affects my wish to have a continued GOP control of Congress. There are bad apples everywhere.”

The Post subsequently received the instant messages from a Democratic college student who had served as a page with the two teenagers who had corresponded with Foley and had shared their instant messages.

Unlike the ABC News source, The Post’s source conceded that he would like to see the Democrats seize control of the House in November, but when approached by a Post reporter about the instant messages, he was reluctant to provide them. Days later, he did so.

The only reason the WaPo would report on the problems with their sources is to head off some pending news. They are desperately trying to get out in front of some damaging news. Interestingly, the Rep Page decided to come forward to protect the kids, unlike his Democrat counterpart:

The two sources said they had conferred about the instant messages, which they had known about for months.

The Republican former page said he had decided it was up to the victims to come forward with them, but once ABC News published the e-mails, “I knew everything I had already known about Foley was finally going to come out. His attraction to young men. His sexual conversations with them, etc.”

What other evidence do we need other than the admissions by Harpers and the WaPo that they dealt with democrat operatives and used democrat sources bent on impacting the coming elections?

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