Surprised no one has mentioned this, but the career of one of the most rabidly conservative members of the Pennsylvania state senate imploded in spectacular fashion over the last 24 hours. That senator, Mike Folmer, resigned on Wednesday afternoon after being busted for possessing child pornography.
On Tuesday night, Folmer, a Republican who represented Lebanon and several suburbs of Harrisburg and York, was arrested after state police simultaneously raided his home and district office. It turns out that back in February, Tumblr had alerted the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children after discovering child porn had been uploaded to the Tumblr account “hoser44” in December 2017.
A six-month investigation revealed that the Tumblr account was created with an email associated with a man named “Michael Jay.” The phone number associated with that email belonged to Folmer, and the Tumblr account was created from a Comcast IP address that traced to Folmer’s home in Lebanon.
When the police collared Folmer at his district office, he agreed to return home and turned over his iPhone. Police discovered three child porn images on the phone. One of them was a picture of a young girl performing oral sex on a young man.
Folmer was booked on charges of possession of child pornography and criminal use of a communications facility. If convicted on both charges, he faces up to 17 years in prison and $40,000 in fines. Read the charging documents here, courtesy The (Harrisburg) Patriot-News.
Pa. Sen. Mike Folmer charged by PennLive on Scribd
If I’m reading this right, the very same image that was uploaded to Tumblr was also on Folmer’s phone when he was arrested.
Within hours of Folmer’s arrest, there were bipartisan calls for him to resign. It initially looked like state senate president pro tem Joe Scarnati and majority leader Jake Corman were going to take a slow-roll approach to this. In their first announcement on the matter on Tuesday night, they announced that Folmer had merely been stripped of his chairmanship of the chamber’s committee on state government.
But by noon, Scarnati and Corman had announced that they had told—not asked—Folmer to resign. As if he had a choice, Folmer complied.
Folmer claimed he was dealing with some “personal problems.” That’s being extremely kind to it, considering the trouble Folmer’s in now.
Until today, Folmer was best known among Pennsylvania political junkies for dumping then-state senate majority leader Chip Brightbill in 2006 amid widespread anger over a 2005 vote to double state legislators’ pay. He hasn’t faced serious opposition since in one of the reddest districts in south-central Pennsylvania. To give you an idea how red this area is, Lebanon hasn’t supported a Democrat for president since 1936, and was one of only four(!) counties in the entire state that supported Goldwater in 1964.
One has to wonder if Folmer thought he could get away with this debauchery, given that his district was basically a sinecure. If so, he learned in the last 24 hours that he is sadly mistaken.