Foley Update: With the news evolving so quickly about what members of the House GOP leadership knew about the Foley scandal, another 
point hadn’t become clear to me. Though I haven’t seen the point made explicitly, it’s clear from the late ABC News reports that there are multiple pages in question.
In this story at the ABC site, reporters write that “according to several former congressional pages, the congressman used the Internet to engage in sexually explicit exchanges.”
There’s another point too though. This all started to come out yesterday when ABC reported on a series of suggestive but not explicit emails between Foley and a House page. That appears to be the then-16 year old page who had been sponsored by Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA). Reportedly, that page became concerned about the suggestiveness of the emails, cut off communication and reported the emails to a member of Alexander’s staff.
The graphic IM exchanges, which blew the story open this afternoon, are clearly from a minor who actively engaged with the congressman. So it seems clear it’s a different page. The clincher is that that the published IM exchange is from 2003, two years earlier. So it’s clear there are at least two different pages in question.
(ed.note: When I write that the other page “actively engaged” with the congressman, this is not meant to imply that minors are legally capable of consent. I make the distinction not to diminish the congressman’s guilt or suggest the minor’s complicity but only to note the apparently different nature of the exchanges.)
