Fordham’s full statement to the AP …

I’ve learned within the last few hours that unnamed sources have purported that I intervened on behalf of [Florida] Congressman [Mark] Foley to prevent a page board investigation. This is categorically false. At no point ever did I ask anyone to block any inquiries into Foley’s actions or behavior. These sources know this allegation is false.

Having stepped down as Mr. Reynolds’ chief of staff, I have no reason to state anything other than the facts. I have no congressman and no office to protect. I intend to fully cooperate with any and every investigation of Mr. Foley’s conduct. At the same time, I will fully disclose to the FBI and the House Ethics Committee any and all meetings and phone calls I had with senior staffers in the House leadership about any of Foley’s inappropriate activities.

The fact is, even prior to the existence of the Foley e-mail exchanges, I had more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene when I was informed of Mr. Foley’s inappropriate behavior. One of these staffers is still employed by a senior House Republican leader. Rather than trying to shift the blame on me, those who are employed by these House leaders should acknowledge what they know about their action or inaction in response to the information they knew about Mr. Foley prior to 2005.

I guess he’s decided he won’t take the fall for this.

This is just a heads-up or perhaps an editorial note about what might be coming down the pike.

There have been a number of signals through the course of the day that the last gambit of the GOP House leadership will be to blame the Foley debacle on a cabal of gay staffers who hid and/or enabled Rep. Foley’s behavior for years. The idea being that they are to blame rather than the leadership.

That may sound like a plot turn out of a bad novel. But with the times we’re living in I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.

Fordham, the staffer who just turned on Hastert, is openly gay, as is at least one other central player in the drama. Fordham’s word now threatens to take down the whole House leadership. So they’re going to throw everything at him.

As an editor, this sort of stuff is always complicated to deal with. You don’t want to preview the hideous slur or give it publicity when you’re trying to warn readers of what the wounded animal is capable of as it fights for its life. But I think the better part of wisdom in this case is to put the effort before people rather than let it bubble out only in the campaign of whispers and acidy newspaper columns. David Corn has some of the best details.

Darker, darker and darker still. From Gannett …

A senior House Republican has asked the House clerk to look into allegations that then-Rep. Mark Foley was turned away from the congressional page dorm on Capitol Hill after arriving there intoxicated one night.

Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH), chairman of the House GOP Conference, another rep who’s election hangs in the balance.

Hastert Chief of Staff Scott Palmer tells TPM Election Central that Fordham’s lying.

A blogger sorts through the Congressional Record for quotes about Rep. Foley’s interest in the pages.

More and more and more. From Copley News Service …

Long before Mark Beck-Heyman ever came to this town in 1995 to work as a congressional page, Congress had revamped the program in hopes of preventing the sort of sex scandals that had disgraced two congressmen more than a decade earlier.

Regardless, the former resident of San Diego’s North Park neighborhood learned almost from day one that there was one person to be careful of: Rep. Mark Foley.

“When I got there, I was warned about Foley from former pages and cloakroom Republican staffers,” said Beck-Heyman, who attended a Catholic high school at the time and was nominated for the page program by Republican Rep. Brian Bilbray, who then lived in Imperial Beach. “The warning was to watch out for him.”

Two years later Tyson Vivyan came to town …

Tyson Vivyan was a congressional page from 1996 to 1997. Now 26, he tells NBC News that he knew Fla. Rep. Mark Foley somewhat during his brief Washington stay, but not well. It wasn’t until after he finished the congressional program and returned home to Tennessee, he says, that Foley began reaching out to him. Vivyan says that he began receiving instant messages in 1997 from someone with the moniker “maf54,” and that the messages were almost immediately sexual in nature.

I guess Denny Hastert was just the last to know.

Mark Schmitt on who’s really at fault in Foleygate.

Percentage of voters in Rep. Tom Reynolds’ (R-NY) district who disapprove of his behavior in Foleygate? According to SurveyUSA, 66%.

Sorry wingnuts: the whistleblower was a Republican.

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.