Like a lot of you, I saw Raw Story’s piece last night on the new Vanity Fair article on Sibel Edmonds. The author mentioned that it was out so far only in New York. So I figured, hey, this living in New York thing has finally come in handy. And I went out to buy a copy.
The real stunners in the piece are Edmonds’ claims — reportedly aired before Congress — that in the course of her work at the FBI she listened to and translated wiretap recordings which appeared to discuss Speaker Hastert receiving large sums of money from a Turkish criminal syndicate. Edmonds made no claim that Hastert’s own voice was on the tapes. And thus there’s no direct evidence or even corraborating evidence for what was allegedly said on the tapes outside of some highly circumstantial evidence Vanity Fair notes regarding the pattern of giving to Hastert’s congressional campaigns.
For the moment I’m not quite sure what to make of it. And the mystery is heightened by the fact that the magazine itself, on the cover, in advance publicity and in the structure of the article itself seems to have made little effort to push this aspect of the story.
(ed.note: This is a revised version of the original post.)
