And Foleygate goes on
The house ethics committee investigation into the Foley scandal is the gift that just keeps on giving. It seems like everyone interviewed has something new and interesting to say about who knew what and when they knew it. The evidence that House Speaker Dennis Hastert, or at least his top staff, knew about Foley is incontravertible by now, the only variable being how long they covered it up. But today another interesting twist to the story was provided to the Ethics Committee by former house clerk Jeff Trandahl.
Trandahl, who was in charge of the page program, testified that one of Hastert's top aides was informed about "all issues dealing with the page program" on a regular basis. The issues included "a problem group of members and staff who spent too much time socializing with pages outside of official duties, one of whom was Mark Foley". Whoa: "A problem group?" "One of whom?" I take the plural reference to mean Foley had company in his pursuit of pages, although so far it looks like he was the only one proficient at one-handed keyboarding. Who were the rest of these guys? Capitol Hill's starting to sound like the eastern franchise of Neverland Ranch.
Whoever the other guys in this "problem group" are, I hope they're all republicans. With any luck their identities should be revealed in the near future; that is, if Karl Rove hasn't already gotten to every page the house has ever employed in the last 6 years and paid them to shut the fuck up. Without evidence from the pages, it's all just allegation, of course. We'll see soon enough... hopefully before November 7th.
Trandahl, who was in charge of the page program, testified that one of Hastert's top aides was informed about "all issues dealing with the page program" on a regular basis. The issues included "a problem group of members and staff who spent too much time socializing with pages outside of official duties, one of whom was Mark Foley". Whoa: "A problem group?" "One of whom?" I take the plural reference to mean Foley had company in his pursuit of pages, although so far it looks like he was the only one proficient at one-handed keyboarding. Who were the rest of these guys? Capitol Hill's starting to sound like the eastern franchise of Neverland Ranch.
Whoever the other guys in this "problem group" are, I hope they're all republicans. With any luck their identities should be revealed in the near future; that is, if Karl Rove hasn't already gotten to every page the house has ever employed in the last 6 years and paid them to shut the fuck up. Without evidence from the pages, it's all just allegation, of course. We'll see soon enough... hopefully before November 7th.
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