On Friday, House Speaker Dennis Hastert denied knowing about the inappropriate, probably illegal, emails sent by Rep. Mark Foley to a 16 year-old boy late last summer. Now he’s been forced to ‘fess up and admit he’s known about the emails for months:
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was notified early this year of inappropriate e-mails from former representative Mark Foley (R-Fla.) to a 16-year-old page, a top GOP House member said yesterday — contradicting the speaker’s assertions that he learned of concerns about Foley only last week.
Hastert did not dispute the claims of Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), and his office confirmed that some of Hastert’s top aides knew last year that Foley had been ordered to cease contact with the boy and to treat all pages respectfully.
Reynolds, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, became the second senior House Republican to say that Hastert has known of Foley’s contacts for months, prompting Democratic attacks about the GOP leadership’s inaction. Foley abruptly resigned his seat Friday.
House Majority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) told The Washington Post on Friday that he had learned in late spring of inappropriate e-mails Foley sent to the page, a boy from Louisiana, and that he promptly told Hastert, who appeared to know already of the concerns. Hours later, Boehner contacted The Post to say he could not be sure he had spoken with Hastert.
Yesterday’s developments revealed a rift at the highest echelons of House Republican ranks a month before the Nov. 7 elections, and they threatened to expand the scandal to a full-blown party dilemma.
Only after Reynolds’s definitive statement did Hastert concede yesterday that he may have been notified of some of the questionable activities of Foley, 52, who had co-chaired the Congressional Missing and Exploited Children’s Caucus.
The GOP leadership appears to be in full meltdown:
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.
Rupert Murdoch helping the perverted, Republican party by sitting on 9/11 video until the Foley pedophile story broke.
1. The original video was aired by the London Sunday Times, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch is a darling of the neocons and right-wing radicals in the Republican Party. The video itself was captured FIVE years ago.
So, how long has Murdoch sat on this tape? Isn’t it a huge coincidence that the video surfaced the same weekend the Rep. Foley child pedophile scandal and Bob Woodward’s newest book, “State of Denial” both hit the mainstream media?
2. About the tape itself: We’re supposed to believe that 9/11, a huge logistical affair and an intelligence nightmare that was pulled off with military precision by the men on the tape were astute and smart enough to be part of that operation, but were too dumb to know how to properly operate a video recorder so that voices would be recorded? Remember, these same guys were able to hijack several of the largest civilian airliners in the world and fly and operate them with ease, but they couldn’t figure out how to make a video tape with sound?
So, which one is it? Are/were these guys the criminal masterminds everyone has been taught to believe or just a couple of dummies?
You can’t have it both ways.
3. Why can’t even State Department linguistics figure out what the men on the tape are saying? Something’s rotten here and i hope to hell there are enough savvy journalists around to dig up the real story.
Greg Bacon
I do not understand why you pretend to be surprised at this news. “The cover up,I mean.)
200 thousand Iraqi’s dead, is hardly ever mentioned. Why, would one sixteen year old boy matter?
If I had been his mother, I would have said what she is supposed to have said,”Don’t go any further,I guess she was frightened he would end up in a ditch.The American governments have always been very good at assassinations of their enemies. World record I think?
I would be asking for protection,if he were my son.
But, then again, who can you trust.
Johanna Moren