Oct 17 2006

Drive By Media Finally Catching Up On Foleygate

Published by at 10:20 pm under All General Discussions,Foleygate

Many bloggers, including myself, were able to discern from the evidence and reporting in hand that the only people who were ‘hiding’ the Foley mess were gay staffers who were probably concerned about the terrible stereotype a gay Congressmen preying on young Pages would conjure up. But, as usual in DC, the real source was revenge. Payback for personal wrongs. So the cover up of Foley for reasons that make some sense, became the weapon against the GOP by the same person who did all the covering up. Here is the NY Times trying to paint a pretty picture around Jeff Trandahl and Kirk Fordham – two people who hid Foley’s problems from the House leadership, and possibly then leaked emails regarding those hidden problems to Democrat operatives and Foley’s Democrat challenger:

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.

9 responses so far

9 Responses to “Drive By Media Finally Catching Up On Foleygate”

  1. MerlinOS2 says:

    AJ

    I have been looking into this and the one small paper story linked in your prior article said Trandahl showed emails the parents had sent him, however I found another article that claims it was only a typed page of the body of text the emails contained is what was shown.

    Both of these articles contradict the other chain of evidence of who saw the emails, since Royal Alexander the chief of staff of Alexander from La who is no relative of his only discussed the content verbally of the emails and never presented them.

  2. MerlinOS2 says:

    One thing that has been bugging me about this whole situation that I really need to make a couple of phone calls about or do more net surfing is considering the dates of the emails being brought out right after Katrina, I would like to see if any locals to the area where the ex page and Alexanders offices had internet access in the wake of Katrina.

    Perhaps it was far enough inland that they still had access. It was clear that a major routing point in New Orleans itself was disabled during the hurricane.

    Baton Rouge had access, but I still haven’t been able to pin down the extent of the internet/email blackout in the aftermath footprint.

  3. Snapple says:

    AJ–

    This group called CREW was very active in the Plame stuff.

    Look at this old article from 2003. It is about Plame, but at the end it says that the writer is with CREW.

    Hope I am not saying something you have already discussed. This gets so confusing. I don’t think that these leftist watchdog groups care about the outing of our operatives. I feel like something bad is happening at a pretty high level.

    http://www.buzzflash.com/contributors/03/12/con03369.html

    The article ends this way:

    I guess the truth is that neither this administration, nor this Congress, cares nearly as much about national security and the safety of undercover operatives [ie Plame] as they do about politics.

    * * *

    Melanie Sloan is the Executive Director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (“CREW”) [LINK]. CREW is a public interest legal watchdog group that exposes government officials who betray the public trust. CREW aims to counterbalance the conservative legal watchdog groups that had such a strong impact over the past decade.

    A BUZZFLASH GUEST COMMENTARY

  4. Snapple says:

    Dear AJ–

    On a hunch I googled this Melanie Sloan of CREW and this name of a
    lawyer named Paul Wolf who was in with Ward Churchill and Cynthia McKinney. They were telling the UN lies about the FBI.

    This lawyer is named Paul Wolf and he is always trying to make the FBI look like criminals. He was writing all about this COINTELPRO.

    Anyway, I found this link which is Paul Wolf making conspiracies about 9-11 against the government. You should look at this Paul Wolf.

    http://forum.newspaperindex.com/viewtopic.php?p=42681&sid=7cdcb47087077d928e64b1cf9974f1bd

    Also search for this Melanie Sloan on this site.

    There are all these conspiracy theories about the FBI and links to pedophiles.

    This was exactly what the activists were doing in Boulder after JonBenet Ramsey was killed. They were claiming the government was protecting pedophiles.

    Please look at this site and the name.

  5. Snapple says:

    Here is part of a post where Wolf is PURPORTEDLY quoted. This is only a snip. He supposedly says Saddam should be put back in power so he can “restore order.” Yeah, maybe by killing everything that moves; not by teaching people to use the political process.

    Wolf was going to argue this at a college, so it is possible to see if he did indeed argue this.

    Others on this site called “FBI Watch” are trying to link the FBI with 9-11 and pedophiles. This FBI Watch site is really trying to discredit the FBI totally–not make loyal criticism. They are making the FBI seem like a bunch of total criminals who are acually helping terrorists.

    After JonBenet Ramsey was killed, these radical lawyers had clients who claimed that she had been killed by a ring of pedophiles who were protected by the government. I don’t think that the government is protecting pedophile rings, do you?

    http://forum.newspaperindex.com/viewtopic.php?p=42681&sid=7cdcb47087077d928e64b1cf9974f1bd
    QUOTE:

    Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2006 5:39 pm Post subject:

    ——————————————————————————–

    just got this from Paul Wolf a friend who is an attorney in Washington DC

    “Just a couple of articles for you this week, then I’m off to Case Western Reserve to defend Saddam Hussein against a symposium of 20 law professors and others, which will be webcast live at http://www.law.case.edu/lectures/. I expect to be on around 10:15-10:30 AM EST on Friday, and will have exactly 12 minutes to defend the President. This may sound impossible, but my argument is quite simple: the court has no legitimacy because it’s the result of an illegal war of aggression, where the winners of the war put the losing government on trial on TV. Also, for practical reasons, Saddam Hussein should be reinstated as President of Iraq. He is probably the only person in the world who can restore order there. ”

    The thread cites an article about an FBI guy named Burrus. The poster views this article as an example of making people falsely believe that the FBI is fighting crime when supposedly really they are making the crime.

    This Burrus is a good guy and I have enountered him trying to help Indians and also catching that Mormon extremist pedophile.

    This post is trying to make it look like Burrus’ achievements are just propaganda.

    I haven’t had a chance to sort this all out, so these are my first impressions.

  6. MerryJ1 says:

    Snapple,

    C.R.E.W. is funded by George Soros. Melanie Sloan’s prior post, I don’t recall where, will have to check, but I do remember recognizing it was as rotten as her present spot as top slop for CREW.

    Soros, by the way, gave $20,000 toward the defense of the blind sheik, Abdul whatsis, and his lawyer, the one who was just convicted and sentenced to a wrist-slap (2 and a half years) for passing on an incarcerated terrorist’s messages to his followers in Egypt.

    That megalomaniac fully intends to spend his Billion Plus bankroll if necessary to bring down the United States. He doesn’t recruit patriots to help him do the job. I cancelled my auto policies with Progressive & switched to another insurance company as soon as I found out the CEO was associated with Soros, just on the old, familiar “show me who you hang with, and I’ll tell you what you are” principle.

    I have no doubt there are some bad eggs, and some just plain incompetents, in the FBI, and in every area of government. Hell, there are some of those (both bad eggs and incompetents) in my own family. But the propaganda you’re catching is just that.

  7. MerryJ1 says:

    Addendum:

    I didn’t mean to imply anything about this Paul Wolf, I don’t think I know anything about him (Paul Wolf is not exactly an uncommon name). If his defense of Saddam Hussein is a mock trial as it sounds, the lawyers (or students) do not necessarily get to choose whether they’re prosecuting or defending, they’re expected to give it their best shot whichever side they draw.

    I don’t think his argument will carry the day, unless the jury is made up of Michael Moore clones, because it isn’t/wasn’t “an illegal war of aggression,” it was a long-delayed repercussion of Hussein’s flouting of a UN Resolution, and of his failure to abide by terms of the Gulf War agreement by shooting at our overflights, etc.; but I can’t think of a defense that would fare any better, either.

  8. Snapple says:

    MaryJ1–

    Check my bog for the anti-FBI activities of Paul Wolf.

    They claim that the FBI repressed dissent. Really the FBI was investigating criminals, drug dealers, and violent revolutionaries.

    That thread I found the purported e-mail on is called FBI Watch.

    Here is my post about Paul Wolf. He is really connected to that Professor Churchill in Colorado. You can’t believe a word he says.
    He just fabricates stuff.

    http://legendofpineridge.blogspot.com/2006/10/paul-wolf-watch-first-installment.html

  9. Snapple says:

    Dear AJ–

    Thanks for responding to my posts and observations.
    It’s nice of you.