The Cage aux Foley cover-up

It would appear that what getting to the bottom of things means to Denny Hastert is finding out who reveled the contents of those salacious communications. Worthy of note, it would seem, is that the media are doing a half decent job keeping the focus on the big story of the leadership involvement in the cover-up and not getting side-tracked on the actions of the "one bad apple" as sensationally sex-related as they are. The calls for Hastert's resignation are coming in now... and not just from the lefties.

But, I had to laugh when I read that Gingrich defended the GOP leadership for having done nothing about Foley because they were concerned about being seen as "gay-bashing". Yeah... right! What's with these people? It's the inappropriateness of the behaviour not the sexual orientation of the people involved that is the problem. He tries to defend the doing nothing because the messages were "relatively innocuous, there was nothing sexual in those notes".

They were inappropriate! They were brought to the attention of the House leadership because the page said they "'freaked him out'' and were "sick . . . sick . . . sick". Gingrich says "the family did not want anyone involved" but it's my understanding that they wanted it to stop; they just didn't want their son to be exposed by anything going public. Not quite as benign as Newt would have us believe. A reasonable person should have seen a red flag here.

From Glenn Greenwald:

The letter sent by Hastert to the DOJ yesterday does not ask for an investigation into the issue at the heart of this scandal -- namely, whether GOP House leaders failed to take action against Foley despite having ample reason to suspect strongly, if not fully know about, Foley's predatory behavior with underage pages. To the contrary, Hastert's letter has two overriding and clear purposes: (1) to exclude this wrongdoing engaged in by Hastert and the GOP House leadership from the DOJ investigation; and (2) to demand instead a criminal investigation into the parties responsible for the disclosure of the Foley story generally and the wrongdoing of Hastert and company specifically.

For that reason, Hastert's letter is plainly designed to bolster the cover-up, to intimidate those who have revealed information about this scandal, and to deter those who might come forward with more information. The letter worsens the scandal because it itself is corrupt.

Howard Kurtz in WaPo had this to report:

On Friday afternoon, a strategist for Rep. Mark Foley tried to cut a deal with ABC's Brian Ross.

The correspondent, who had dozens of instant messages that Foley sent to teenage House pages, had asked to interview the Florida Republican. Foley's former chief of staff said the congressman was quitting and that Ross could have that information exclusively if he agreed not to publish the raw, sexually explicit messages.

Glenn follows up with:

If, as appears highly likely, the "former chief of staff" who tried to cut this deal for Mark Foley is Krik Fordham, then it means that Tom Reynolds' current Chief of Staff tried to suppress the release of the IMs by ABC and thereby deprive the American public of learning about the extent of Foley's conduct. That is the very definition of "cover-up." And if it wasn't Fordham himself who did the negotiating with ABC, did he know (while advising Foley on the scandal) about the effort made on behalf of Foley to ensure those IMs never saw the light of day? Was Tom Reynolds' current chief of staff actively attempting to suppressing this critical information from being reported or involved in any way in that effort?

It seems like those questions ought to be posed to Tom Reynolds and Kirk Fordham right away (h/t AL).

Atrios:

So, Hastert thinks the really important thing to do is investigate those who had copies of the IMs and emails like, say, the guys Foley was sending them to in order to find out why they didn't turn them over to the FBI.

This is a sick and twisted bunch of people running our government - letting a predatory colleague stick around in order to cover it up and then essentially threatening to go after anyone who comes forward with information.

Your Republican party, protector of predators.