Foleygate: Hastert’s Story Clashes with Recent RevelationsDenny Hastert and others in the Republican leadership say that they never heard a thing about Mark Foley’s indiscretions with House pages before the fall of 2005. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it.
But a trickle of stories over the past few days have made that account even harder to believe. Since all the details can get confusing, below is a narrative of warnings and interventions before the leadership says it knew about Foley’s problem.
As early as 1997, Foley began sending sexually explicit messages to a page; other pages have come forward from the 1998, 2000, and 2002 classes saying that they also received explicit messages.
The first reported intervention with Foley came in 2000 from Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-AZ), who had a private meeting with him after a page alerted Kolbe that Foley had sent him inappropriate messages. A source, who had copies of the offending instant messages and showed them to The Washington Post, said they were “sexually explicit”; Kolbe’s office denied that and said the messages only made the page “uncomfortable.”
Kolbe’s spokeswoman told the Post that she “could not yet determine” whether Kolbe had notified anyone else (i.e. the Republican leadership) about Foley’s problem.
As early as 2001, the Clerk of the House, Jeff Trandahl, notified Kirk Fordham, Foley’s former chief of staff, that Foley’s behavior with the pages was a problem. Over the course of the next couple years, Trandahl notified Fordham “several times,” that Foley had a problem.
Finally, in 2003, Trandahl and Fordham agreed that they should go to Speaker Hastert’s office about the problem. Newsweek reports that this intervention was prompted by Foley’s drunken visit to the House page dormitory.
According to Fordham’s lawyer, Fordham will tell the ethics committee that he went to Hastert’s chief of staff Scott Palmer with the problem and that a meeting between Foley and Palmer ensued. Palmer has vaguely denied Fordham’s account, saying only that “What Kirk Fordham said did not happen.” However, a second congressional staffer, speaking to The Wasington Post, ABC News, and The New York Times, has corroborated Fordham’s account that Palmer met with Foley.
A “knowledgeable source familiar with Fordham’s account” told Newsweek that after the meeting, Fordham called Palmer to see how it went. Palmer told him that he “dealt with it” and that he “informed the Speaker.” This source told Newsweek that Fordham would say the same thing to the ethics committee.
When TPM called up Fordham’s lawyer Timothy Heaphy about this, he declined to confirm that Palmer had said he’d spoken to the Speaker about it, citing the ongoing investigations.
But here’s what you’d have to believe to buy Hastert’s contention that his office didn’t know anything until the Fall of 2005. Scott Palmer lives in a D.C. townhouse with Hastert and Mike Stokke, Hastert’s deputy chief of staff (who was one of the staffers who dealt with Foley’s “over-friendly” emails to another page in 2005). They fly back to Illinois together every weekend. Hastert, suffice it to say, is very close to his staff. For the House leadership’s story to be true, you have to believe that this is a topic that just didn’t come up in the trio’s many hours spent together.
