I have been working on getting a
dKospedia entry on the Foley scandel (including timeline)_ together. I have it pretty much nailed down up to the date that
ABC News publishes the emails, though I have not yet added the plea from Reynold's Cheif of Staff who was on loan to Foley's office not to publish. I will work on the ensueing cluster-fuck of lies and contradicting statments as it unfolds in the next part, starting tomorrow evening.
I have also removed a lot of non-essential dKospedia links in the actual article to things like the entries of the various people as they are mentioned, links to wikipedia entries for other terms not really covered or suitable for dKospedia inclusion because it is outside the intended scope of what dKospedia seeks to include.
The entry so far and the timeline is below the fold.
OVERVIEW
The Mark Foley scandal' erupted publicly in late September 2006 when ABC News reported that a former congressional page had complained about emails sent by Republican Congressman Mark Foley of Florida. After the story broke, additional former and current pages came forward with transcripts of sexually explicit internet messages received from Foley.
The basic outlines of the scandal are that Foley solicited minors for sex online via emails and instant messages. This would be a felony in the State of Florida were Foley resides, and may also be a possible federal felony with regard to soliciting across state lines and, ironically, one of the very laws in which Foley, as Co-chair on the Committee for Missing and Exploited Children helped enact during his tenure. Further, and many would say more damning, is that Republican leadership in the House, who were informed that their might be a problem with Foley's conduct chose to ignore it and cover-up the issue without fully investigating it and continue to do so.
MARK FOLEY/GOP SCANDAL - Timeline
EARLY SIGNS OF TROUBLE
A 'Warning' in 2001
A Republican staff member informally warns pages "to watch out for Congressman Mark Foley." A former page, Matthew Loraditch, the president of the Page Alumni Association says that they were told "don't get too wrapped up in him being too nice to you and all that kind of stuff." Loraditch later clarifies this televised statement as the scandal begins to unfold after criticism of his statment, by staying that he had been told "informally by a supervisor" that "Foley was a bit odd or flaky" but not that he should be avoided and that the term "warning" was an unfortunate choice of words.
Hey You... Get Into My Car
In late May or early June of 2002 Foley takes a 16-year-old male page for a private lunch at Morton's Steakhouse in his BMW convertable sports car. This is a result of a winning bid for "lunch with Mark Foley" at a fund-raising auction for a House page event. Such rides around town with young male pages strike Congressional staffers as unusual for young pages to go for rides in a member's cars.
SEXUAL HARRASSMENT AND PREDATION
Foley's online sexual predation of minors, as far as what has come to light at this point, begins in 2003 and continues to at least the fall of 2005.
Instant Messages in 2003
Rep. Mark Foley has sexually explicit IM exchanges with a 16 year-old male who was a former Congressional page, via Foley's personal AOL account name Maf54, from a hotel in Pensicola Florida. The former Congressional page was at his home in Louisiana at the time. In these conversations Foley directs the conversation to discussing how the teen masturbates, the size of his penis and asks him to take his penis out of his pants in what seems to be an intended initiation of "cyber sex" which usually involves simultaneous masturbation while "chatting" explicitly about sex.
In another message exchange with the teen, Foley appears to describe having been together with the teen in San Diego. The messages also show the teen is, at times, uncomfortable with Foley's aggressive approach.
E-mails in 2005
Ostensibly in response to a 'thank you' card a Congressional page gives to Foley for being nice to him during his service as a page, Foley asks the page for his home e-mail address. Thinking nothing of it, the teen gives Foley the e-mail address. Beginning on July 29, 2005 Foley begins sending inappropriate e-mails to this and other former Congressional pages from locations in North Carolina and Florida. In them, he asks the page his age, what he wants for his birthday, discusses the physique of another male page by the name of Will Humble, and solicits the page to send him photographs of himself.
It is after Foley asks in the fifth email for the teen to send him a picture of himself, that the former page becomes uncomfortable with Foley's conversations and stops replying to them and contacts the office of Republican Rodney Alexander of Louisiana, about the e-mails.
GOP TOLD OF E-MAILS
Notifying Alexander's Office
On August 30, 2005 the teen is in contact with the office of his sponsor Republican Rodney Alexander of Louisiana, about e-mails he had received from Foley that asked about the boy's age, then 16, and his birthday and requested a picture. He then forwards the email to someone with a house.gov email address (pressuamably Alexander's office) on August 31, 2005 and expresses his concern about the email, highlighting the parts that unnerved and concerned him, describing the passage where Foley asks him to send him photographs of himself as "Sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick sick...". Alexander would later claim that he only learned of the emails from a reporter.
Alexander passes the buck
Alexander contacts the page's family, and later states he was told by his parents that "they didn't want me to do anything." Alexander informs Rep. Thomas Reynolds of New York, the chairman of the House Republican campaign organization that a concern about Foley's inapproaite communication with the page was brought to his office, and then drops the matter.
Hastert Discusses it with Alexander?
Tim Kennedy, a staff assistant in the House Speaker Dennis Hastert's Office, will later claim that they received a telephone call from Alexander's Chief of Staff who indicated that he has an email exchange between Congressman Foley and a former House page they were concerned about. They will later claim that Mike Stokke, Deputy Chief of Staff for Speaker Hastert, called Jeff Trandahl, then Clerk of the House, and asked him to come to the Speaker's Office so that he could put him together with Congressman Alexander's Chief of Staff to discuss the matter. Hasert will later claim that he first heard of the emails in the week in which the scandal finally explodes in Septermber of 2006, a year later.
When is Late 2005?
House Page Board chairman Rep. John Shimkus in late 2005 learns from Trandahl about the e-mail exchange. Shimkus and Trandahl are never actually shown the contents of the emails yet meet with Foley. The meeting consists of Shimkus advising Foley no longer have communications with the page. No inquiriey into any other email or exchanges between Foley and other pages are discussed or investigated, no other pages are interviewed, no investigation of any kind is undertaken.
Shimkus does not inform Rep. Dale Kildee, the only Democrat on the three-person Page Committee or Representative Shelley Moore Capito, the other Republican on the board. About this failure, Shimkus will go on to say on October 2, 2006 that "what I did was fine. If I regret something, maybe I should have had Dale [Kildee] with me because now it's going to be a political football." This also will contradict later statements made that the board investigated the emails in 2005, when no other members of the board even notified of the troubling emails, much less any investigation being conducted by the board.
The Autumn of Our Lies
In November of 2005 a number of news organizations, including the Tampa Bay Times, receive the emails. The paper launches an investigation into them, but concludes it was just "friendly chit-chat." and the page's family does not wish to go on record. The Tampa Bay Times then seeks out other pages, but only finds one other page willing to disclose having email contact with Foley and states that he found nothing odd in his emails with Foley. The newspaper having only a single set of emails and the page not willing to go on record about his being unerved by Foley's email, chose not to run the story.
At the end of 2005, Foley is still left as Co-Chair of the Committee for Missing and Exploited Children, and is in no way prevented from interacting with pages, nor are pages warned after the troubling emails were brought to the attention of the GOP leadership, nor were any steps taken as a precautionary measure, or any investigation carried out.
Springtime for Hastert... and Mark Foley
NRCC chairman Tom Reynolds, whose function within the GOP is to corodinate efforts to elect Republicans to the House, personally speaks with Hastert about the matter early in spring of 2006, after being approached by Alexander on the subject, following the February GOP leadership elections. Once the scandal erupts, Hastert will later claim that he did not "explicitly recall" that conversation but that he did not dispute it. House Majority Leader, John Boehner somewhere around this time learns of the of "inappropriate 'contact' between Foley and a 16-year-old page" and speaks with Hastert about it. Boehner will later change his story two more times, first changing it to his not recalling talking to Hastert, then finally denying he ever talked to Hastert about the matter in the spring of 2006.
On May 10, 2006 Reynold's personal PAC, TOMPAC, donates $5,000 to Foley's campaign. Later, on June 27th, Foley writes a $100,000 check to the NRCC, which is chaired by Reynolds on the very same day that he attends a signing ceremony at the White House for the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of 2006 which ironically is a law which Foley seems to have broken by sexually harassing minors online.
SCANDAL ERUPTS
On September 28, 2006 ABC publishes emails between Foley and former page.