Earlier, Josh posted on NRCC chair Tom Reynolds’ statement that he had told Speaker Hastert about the Mark Foley situation in early 2006. Why is Reynolds throwing Denny from the train?
Republican insiders said Reynolds spoke out because he was angry that Hastert appeared willing to let him take the blame for the party leadership’s silence.
A House GOP leadership aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of losing his job, said that Reynolds realizes he has taken a shot at his leader but that it is understandable.
“This is what happens when one member tries to throw another member under a bus,” the aide said.
Indeed. When one GOP congressman tries to damage another politically, it’s time to speak out. But when a GOP congressman tries to proposition an underage page? Silence is the better part of what passes for GOP valor these days.
Well, now, which is it?
In this evening’s painstakingly prepared statement by Speaker Hastert’s office on the Rep. Mark Foley matter, it is made to appear that the emails between Foley and the page were never passed on to GOP higher-ups by the page’s sponsoring congressman, Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA), in deference to the page’s family and their desire for privacy. But a report tonight from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch‘s Washington Bureau calls that account into serious question.
First, the relevant portion of the Hastert statement:
The Clerk asked to see the text of the email. Congressman Alexander’s office declined citing the fact that the family wished to maintain as much privacy as possible and simply wanted the contact to stop. The Clerk asked if the email exchange was of a sexual nature and was assured it was not. Congressman Alexander’s Chief of Staff characterized the email exchange as over-friendly.
The Clerk then contacted Congressman Shimkus, the Chairman of the Page Board to request an immediate meeting. It appears he also notified Van Der Meid that he had received the complaint and was taking action. This is entirely consistent with what he would normally expect to occur as he was the Speaker’s Office liaison with the Clerk’s Office.
The Clerk and Congressman Shimkus met and then immediately met with Foley to discuss the matter. They asked Foley about the email. Congressman Shimkus and the Clerk made it clear that to avoid even the appearance of impropriety and at the request of the parents, Congressman Foley was to immediately cease any communication with the young man.
Now, here’s what the Post-Dispatch reports, from an interview today with the aforementioned Shimkus:
Last year, the House clerk grabbed Rep. John Shimkus off the floor during a vote and said they needed to talk.
It wasnât unusual for the clerk at that time, Jeff Trandahl, to catch Shimkus, in the hallway or on the House floor, since together they oversaw the House page program and often had items to discuss.
This time, though, Trandahl had in his hand an email exchange between one of the House pages, a 16-year-old boy, and Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla.
Shimkus, who serves as board chairman for the House page program, read the emails, in which Foley asked about the boyâs well-being in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, what he wanted for his birthday, and for a photograph. (The boy was from Louisiana and had returned to his home state.)
Although there was nothing sexually suggestive in the emails, Shimkus and Trandal agreed: “That was enough for us to approach Mark,” Shimkus recalled an interview Saturday.
Soon after, they met with Foley and his chief of staff in the Florida congressmanâs office. “We basically said, âWe got these emails. And we donât think this is appropriate. … You have to stop (contacting this boy)â,” Shimkus said.
Shimkus told the paper that he thinks he did the right thing given the information he had at the time, though he regrets not having involved his Democratic colleague on the board overseeing the page program. “If I regret something maybe I should have had Dale (Kildee, a Democratic board member and congressmen from Michigan) with me because now itâs going to be a political football.”
On Friday night, the Post-Dispatch reports, Shimkus met with the pages currently in the program. Just days after “reading them the riot act” about behaving in the program, he told them: “Iâm embarrassed Iâm ashamed. This lecture I gave you I should give to my colleagues.”
Early this evening I was starting to think that Foleygate might truly be the scandal that dare not speak its name. I don’t mean whatever Mark Foley himself did. He’s apologized, resigned and, I imagine, will soon face criminal indictment under laws he helped write. In a sense, that scandal has run its course. The scandal I’m talking about is the mix 
of cover-up and enabling that reached its way through the highest reaches of the House Republican leadership. Early this evening neither the Post nor the Times had devoted a story specifically to the contradictory stories coming out of the House leadership. Now, though, that seems to have changed.
I’ve been at this blog racket for almost six years. And usually you’ve got to really pore over the details to find the inconsistencies and contradictions. So I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this big a train wreck where leaders at the highest eschelons of power repeatedly fib, contradict each other and change their stories so quickly. It’s mendacity as performance art; you can see the story unravel in real time.
Just consider, Denny Hastert has repeatedly said he didn’t know anything about the Foley problem until Thursday. But two members of the leadership — Boehner and Reynolds — say no, they warned him about it months ago. Hastert got Boehner to recant; Reynolds is sticking to his guns.
Rodney Alexander brought the matter to the Speaker’s office. And Hastert’s office tonight put out the results of a detailed internal review of what happened in which they revealed that no member of the House leadership — not Hastert or Shimkus or the House Clerk — had actually laid eyes on the emails in question.
Only Hastert’s office apparently didn’t touch base with Rep. Shimkus, since as Hastert’s crew was writing out their statement, Shimkus was over giving an interview to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in which he described how he and the Clerk had read the emails.
(ed.note: 2:19 AM, 10/1/06 … What makes this even more comical is that, according to the AP “Shimkus, who avoided reporters for hours, worked out his statement with Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office.” Didn’t seem to help.)
So the centerpiece point of the Hastert statement this evening appears to have been a fabrication.
It stood up for maybe three or four hours.
At present, the Speaker is committed to portraying himself as a sort of Speaker Magoo. We’re supposed to believe that pretty much everyone in the House GOP leadership knew about this but him.
These fibs and turnabouts amount to a whole far larger than the sum of its parts. Even the most cynical politicians carefully vet their stories to assure that they cannot easily be contradicted by other credible personages. When you see Majority Leaders and Speakers and Committee chairs calling each other liars in public you know that the underlying story is very bad, that the system of coordination and hierarchy has broken down and that each player believes he’s in a fight for his life.
I mentioned this earlier. And I think it deserves 
more attention. We continue to hear that the initial conversations about Rep. Foley’s (R-FL) emails occurred in ‘late 2005’. The House Clerk, who played a key role in what happened and interviewed Foley along with Rep. Shimkus (R-IL), was then Jeff Trandahl.
Trandahl resigned from his position as Clerk around the time this was all happening. He left the position on November 18th, 2005. And the first public mention I can find of his departure was in statement released by Speaker Hastert on September 30th, 2005. The suspect emails reportedly were sent in August 2005. And copies of those emails later forwarded to a staffer in Rep. Rodney Alexander’s (R-LA) office suggest the page first contacted Alexander’s office on August 31st.
Trandahl became Executive Director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.
More clarity on just when these events occurred could quickly rule out his departure being tied in some way to the Foley imbroglio. But it seems quite probable the events in question took place early in September 2005.
Regardless of the reasons behind his leaving the Clerkship, Trandahl is probably in a better position to shed more light on this matter than almost anyone. I believe the Clerk is given a large degree of responsibility for the pages under House Rules. And of all the players in the drama he’s the only one who is at least notionally independent. That is, not a member of the House nor a staffer working for a particular member.
To the best of my knowledge no one has yet gotten Trandahl on the record. We haven’t heard his story.
Foley: “If I were one of these sickos, I’d be nervous with America’s Most Wanted on my trail.”
Rep. Mark Foley and America’s Most Wanted’s John Walsh discuss Foley’s new anti-child predator legislation.
Rep. Foley remained as Co-Chair of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus for almost a year after the email issue came to light.
Florida Department of Law Enforcement conferring with FBI over who has jurisdiction in Foley probe.
Last Days of Pompeii Watch or Great Moments in CYA parody.
From joint statement released today by Reps. Hastert (R-IL), Boehner (R-OH) and Blunt (R-MO) …
We have also asked for the creation of a toll-free telephone number for House Pages, parents, grandparents, and staff to confidentially report incidents of concern.
I’m sure this will inspire a lot of confidence in the operation they’re running, that the leaders of the House have set up a toll-free number for pages to report sexual advances by members of Congress.
Open secret watch (from Scripps-Howard)…
Sexually explicit messages from former Rep. Mark Foley to one former congressional page might be just the tip of the iceberg, the leader of an alumni association for former congressional pages told Scripps Howard News Service on Saturday.
While Foley resigned this week after published reports of “friendly” e-mails to one 16-year-old male page and the pending broadcast of more sexually explicit instant messages, similar graphic messages from him were received by at least three other teenage boys who once worked in the page program, said Matthew Loraditch, a Maryland college senior who runs the U.S. House Page Alumni Association’s Internet message board.
…
Loraditch said during his time on Capitol Hill, Foley was one of the members of Congress who expressed what appeared to be a sincere interest in the young pages, often visiting the areas where they congregate in the corner of the House of Representatives chamber to chat or offer stories and advice.
Loraditch said he and other pages viewed Foley as gregarious and “flaky” at the time, and that he offered several of them, not including Loraditch, his personal e-mail when they were graduating from the program and saying goodbyes.
After Loraditch returned to Maryland and began attending college at Towson University, several male former pages told him they had received Internet messages that were similar to the graphic messages first reported by ABC News last week.
More soon.
Former House Majority Leader Tom Delay was known for–indeed prided himself and built his power upon–his encyclopedic knowledge of the House GOP caucus: members’ likes and dislikes, their personal and political strengths and weaknesses, their pressure points.
Delay was Majority Leader until February 2006. So when the emails between Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) and a congressional page first came to the attention of the House leadership last fall, Delay was still majority leader. (Ironically, Delay’s successor as majority leader, Rep. John Boehner (R-OH), came to Congress as a result of a sex-with-a-minor scandal involving the then-incumbent Buz Lukens, whom Boehner defeated in the GOP primary in 1990.) So what did Delay know, and when?
Now the broad version of events being put out by Hastert and Company is that this all came to their attention when Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA) brought the concerns of the page and his family to the leadership. No one can get their story straight about what happened after that, but that is the starting point for the story, or so we are told.
But if Foley already had a “reputation” among congressional pages, you can bet his reputation extended to staffers and probably to congressmen themselves. One thing that seems to be missing from the GOP reaction is shock or surprise. Maybe I’ve simply overlooked them, but I haven’t seen any quotes along the lines of what you usually expect when something like this breaks: the befuddled reactions of those who knew the alleged perpetrator but had no idea he was even capable of what he is being accused of. I’m thinking of those standard quotes from serial killers’ neighbors: he was quiet, kept to himself, seemed completely normal.
It’s a small world up there on the Hill, and you just don’t get the sense that this is a bolt from the blue. I’d be surprised if some reporters didn’t already have the low-down on Foley’s “over-friendly” ways.
The peccadilloes of congressmen is the black market currency on the Hill. Gossip is golden. And Tom Delay was the leading broker. So what did he know and when?
This just gets better and better.
Last night we posted about an interview that Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL), chairman of the board which oversees the congressional page program, gave yesterday to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. In the interview, Shimkus said that both he and the Clerk of the House saw the actual emails sent by Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) to a congressional page when they conducted their “investigation” of Foley last fall.
That contradicts the official version of events put out late yesterday by his fellow Illinoisan, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, whose internal investigation found that Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA) declined to provide the emails in question out of respect for the page and his family, who desired privacy.
Still with me? It’s about to require a flow chart to keep this all straight.
While Shimkus is telling the St. Louis paper that, yes, he saw the emails, his spokeman is telling another local paper that, no, he didn’t (emphasis is mine):
Shimkus was unavailable for comment, but through his spokesman, Steve Tomaszewski, he acknowledged speaking to Foley last year after being notified about one of the e-mails that Foley had sent to a page assigned to the office of a Louisiana congressman.
Shimkus “did not see personally any e-mail a year ago when he dealt with the issue,” Tomaszewski said. “He was only told of the one e-mail that came out first, which references, ‘How are you doing after the hurricane?’ and, ‘Send me a picture.'”
Got that?
Hastert’s internal investigation says Shimkus never saw the emails. Shimkus says he did. Shimkus’ spokesman says he didn’t.
Whew, glad we got that cleared up.