Rep’s Letter Is Bad News for Former House Clerk

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Earlier this week, Rep. Deborah Pryce (R-OH) sent a letter to the clerk of the House requesting a probe into rumors that a drunk Mark Foley was turned away from the House page dormitory.

That part got a lot of attention, and for good reason. But Pryce repeated a second allegation in her letter, something she also heard during a GOP conference call on Oct. 2, that didn’t get much play: Jeff Trandahl, onetime House clerk at the time of much of Foley’s newly-revealed transgressions, had been warned about Foley by the director of the page program.

“[A]nother claim was brought forth that the director of the Republican pages brought specific concerns about then-Congressman Foley’s behavior to the attention of the then-Clerk of the House,” Pryce wrote.

Our attempts to reach Trandahl were unsuccessful, although we learned he has hired a lawyer to represent him. An assistant in his office was unable to tell us his lawyer’s name.

You can read the letter for yourself here. We checked in with Pryce’s office this afternoon; so far they’ve heard no response.

The correspondence was first reported by a Gannett reporter, who noted that a Capitol Police representative could find no record of the dorm incident in the force’s records.

The letter was sent days before ABC released a new report in which a former House page reveals Foley came by the page dorm. The page does not say he was drunk.

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