Greenwald:
As Brad DeLong documented, Boehner has changed his story multiple times. He first told The Washington Post, definitively, that he talked months ago to Hastert about Foley and "that Hastert assured him 'we're taking care of it.'" But then, when Boehner learned that Hastert had denied knowing about Foley's page problem at all, Beohner "contacted The Post and said he could not remember whether he talked to Hastert." Then, in Roll Call: "Boehner strongly denied media reports late Friday night that he had informed Hastert of the allegations, saying 'That is not true.'" [...]
And now there seems to be still another Boehner version, as The Palm Beach Post reports this morning: "Boehner told the Dayton Daily News he was '99 percent' sure he talked to Hastert about the matter, but also said he did not recall their conversation."
So: (a) Boehner told Hastert about Foley and Hastert assured him they were "taking care of it"; (b) Boehner does not remember whether he ever talked to Hastert about Foley; (c) Boehner affirmatively claims that it "is not true" that he spoke with Hastert; and now, (d) Boehner is "99 percent" sure he talked to Hastert about Foley but remembers nothing about the converstaion. Does that sound like someone qualified to be Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives, let alone Denny Hastert's replacement for Speaker of the House?
Sounds to me like a man fishing for a story he can stick to. Or maybe Boehner and Hastert are in a bigger brawl than we know, right now.
In other news, AMERICAblog confirmed yesterday that it was NRCC head Tom Reynolds' current chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, that tried last Friday to make a deal with ABC News to block them from reporting on the Foley messages. And Reynolds is now saying that Fordham was acting on his own, without Reynolds' permission.
There's more to come on that front, I think, because those stories don't pass anything resembling a smell test. Fordham was reported on Saturday as publicly assisting Foley. It seems Reynolds was completely unaware -- we're supposed to believe, anyway -- that his own chief of staff has been, for three days, working for Foley on damage control? A mere six weeks before the midterm elections, Reynolds doesn't know what his own chief of staff is up to? Yeah -- that doesn't fly.
So was Fordham acting on his own to help shield evidence of the child sex predation, out of returned loyalty to Foley? Could be, though it seems very hard to believe Reynolds didn't know about it happening. The Los Angeles Times reports that Fordham was known as a Foley fixit man:
Beck-Heyman, the former page, said several other male pages in his class also had been approached by Foley. "Mark Foley knew he could get away with this type of behavior with male pages because he was a congressman," he said.
Another former staffer said it was an oft-repeated story around Capitol Hill that Foley's former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, would sometimes accompany the congressman to keep him out of trouble.
Fordham represents a link between Foley and House GOP leaders. Shortly after leaving Foley's office last year, he became chief of staff to Rep. Thomas M. Reynolds (R-N.Y.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
Reynolds has said he was told this spring about the e-mails that sparked the initial complaint about Foley.
So which is it -- was Fordham back working as "fixit" for Foley here, or still working for Reynolds, or for the NRCC, or all of the above? Reynolds says he didn't know about his chief of staff's actions -- all right, let's go from there: what's Reynolds going to do about his chief of staff taking such a remarkable step as to try to get this story pulled from the press?
That's some of what reporters were trying to ask Reynolds today, while Reynolds was hiding behind a sea of children in his Foley "press conference". So far, Reynolds ain't answering.
Hastert, for his part, is blaming the children, so where the others are simply trying to tread water and find a story that they can all finally go with, Hastert himself wins the prize for sickest pro-predator sleaze. That's probably why Boehner and Reynolds aren't going to too much effort to cover his sorry ass on this one -- they've got problems of their own, and he's out there attacking the victims, making the story worse.