Kirk Fordham, longtime Chief of Staff to Mark Foley (R-FL) and more recently to Rep. Tom Reynolds (R-NY), moved to the center stage of Foleygate today. So I wanted to chart out a few things we know about his accusations and him.
Here are some key passages in tomorrow’s story from the Post …
A longtime chief of staff to disgraced former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.) approached House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s office three years ago, repeatedly imploring senior Republicans to help stop Foley’s advances toward teenage male pages, the staff member said yesterday
…
Fordham says his warnings to Hastert’s office dealt with a different matter: reports of Foley’s troubling interest in male pages working in the Capitol Hill complex. He says he implored the highest ranks of the GOP leadership to intervene to thwart behavior that he had been unable to stop after multiple confrontations with his boss. Sources close to the matter say a meeting took place between a senior Hastert aide and Foley before Fordham’s January 2004 departure, probably in 2003, in a small conference room on the third floor of the Capitol.
The suggestion seems to be that this 
happened late in 2003, before his departure from Foley’s employ in January 2004.
But let’s go back further.
Fordham started working for Foley in 1994. He was his top aide through early 2003. And during his abortive campaign for the senate he was noted in the press as Foley’s ‘top advisor’, though it’s not clear to me whether he officially left the Hill to work on the campaign proper.
Foley’s campaign was derailed by widely circulated rumors that he was gay — rumors Foley denounced but also wouldn’t deny. He eventually dropped out of the race in September 2003.
Here’s a brief description of the end of the campaign in a piece in the Palm Beach Post from September 5th, 2003 …
Foley made the final decision during a torturous weekend just days after ending a successful 30-day, 30-county campaign trip around Florida. On Tuesday night, he talked over the decision with his top adviser, Kirk Fordham. By Wednesday, the decision was hardening. On Thursday, he began telling his staff.
What is important to note is that the last four or five months prior to Foley’s withdrawal from the race saw a rising crescendo of rumors and innuendos about his homosexuality — rumors his opponents in the race for the GOP senate nomination played at least some role in circulating. A senior aide to Florida Republican Clay Shaw (R) was forced to admit that she had played a role in doing so.
Now, here’s the thing. If you read back through the press clippings you see that Fordham, who himself happens to be gay, played the lead role in trying to beat back the rumors and keep them from sinking his boss’s campaign.
With Foley making high-profile campaign swings through the state and political opponents trying to feed rumors about his sexuality, it is very hard to imagine that his seemingly intense attraction to young men didn’t come up. And Fordham would have known because it was his job to keep those stories out of the press.
When we were first discussing Fordham today at TPM, it seemed hard to figure he would have been trying to get Hastert’s office to crackdown on Foley’s behavior while simultaneously acting as the lead force trying to propel Foley into the senate.
But the available evidence suggests a different scenario. Go back to 2003. Fordham’s spent much of the spring and the summer trying to keep his boss’s personal life from destroying his career. According to what Fordham is telling people now, he had confronted Foley several times about his behavior with underage boys — a pretty standard story for political operatives with boss’s who can’t or won’t control their self-destructive habits.
From what I can glean from the history, it doesn’t seem like Fordham would have been trying to sabotage his boss while supposedly trying to keep him in the senate race. He appears to have left on good terms in early 2004, remained close to Foley and his sister and, perhaps most telling, he intervened for Foley on Friday in a last ditch effort to spare his old boss the humiliation of 
the release of those infamous IM transcripts. (Fordham offered to give ABC’s Brian Ross an exclusive on Foley’s resignation in exchange for not printing the transcripts. Ross said, no deal.)
Perhaps Fordham spent those months trying to keep the rumors of Foley’s sexuality out of the press. But during that time he either learns of or has to focus more closely on Foley’s issues with underage men. He tries but is unable to get him to cool it. And then after the campaign is over, perhaps in an effort to save Foley from himself, he goes to the leadership to try to get them to intervene to protect Foley from himself. Perhaps he’d just decided he couldn’t let it go on any more.
I always try to be as clear as I can on this site in distinguishing between what is reporting and what is speculation informed by reporting. I hope I’ve done so here.
Certainly, there are other possibilities. When he spoke to the Times, Fordham only said that the meetings with Hastert’s office were between 2001 and 2003. And he said he was prompted to do so after the House Clerk, Jeff Trandahl, approached him with accounts from pages who had come forward with complaints about Foley’s behavior.
(Remember, Trandahl was the House Clerk who, with Rep. Shimkus, interviewed Foley about the suspicious emails in 2005. To the best of my knowledge, Trandahl has been entirely mum through this whole saga.)
I think it’s hard to believe that it is a coincidence though that Foley’s effective outing, the end of Fordham’s tenure with Foley and the alleged warnings to Hastert’s office all appear to have happened over a period of roughly six months. Something was happening.
