Let’s see. On the one hand you have Dennis Hastert, who says that he didn’t know anything about Mark Foley’s predilection for underage boys until last week. What do we have on the other side? Well, first we have the recollections of Majority Leader John Boehner and and National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Thomas M. Reynolds, who claim they informed Hastert this spring. Then we have the testimony of Foley’s former chief of staff, “Kirk Fordham, who said earlier this week that he had appealed to [Hastert’s chief of staff] Palmer in 2003 or earlier to intervene, after Fordham’s own efforts to stop Foley’s behavior had failed.” And now we have an anonymous staffer that corroborates Fordham’s story.
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert’s chief of staff confronted then-Rep. Mark Foley about his inappropriate social contact with male pages well before the speaker said aides in his office took any action, a current congressional staff member with personal knowledge of Foley and his behavior with pages said yesterday.
The staff member said Hastert’s chief of staff, Scott Palmer, met with the Florida Republican at the Capitol to discuss complaints about Foley’s behavior toward pages. The alleged meeting occurred long before Hastert says aides in his office dispatched Rep. John M. Shimkus (R-Ill.) and the clerk of the House in November 2005 to confront Foley about troubling e-mails he had sent to a Louisiana boy.
It gets even worse for Hastert, because Fordham looks like he is out for blood.
Palmer said this week that the meeting Fordham described “did not happen.” Timothy J. Heaphy, Fordham’s attorney, said yesterday that Fordham is prepared to testify under oath that he had arranged the meeting and that both Foley and Palmer told him the meeting had taken place. Fordham spent more than three hours with the FBI on Thursday, and Heaphy said that on Friday he contacted the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct to offer his client’s cooperation.
“We are not preparing to cooperate. We are affirmatively seeking to,” Heaphy said.
I think this is kind of an ‘oh-shit’ moment for Dennis Hastert. I don’t see how he can get out of this one. He may not even be able to win re-election. This is a pretty big brazen lie that he has been caught at in front of the whole world.
But this story gets even weirder. Really weird.
Just to set the stage for this, Jeff Trandahl was House Clerk from 1999 to 2005. He was in charge of overseeing the page program. Rep. John M. Shimkus of Illinois was and is the chairman of the House page committee. Some of the pages described Trandahl as a strict disciplinarian and were glad to see him go. But did his stepping down have something to do with his attitude towards Foley?
Sources close to Fordham say Trandahl repeatedly urged the longtime aide and close family friend to confront Foley about his inappropriate advances on pages. Each time, Foley pledged to no longer socialize with the teenagers, but, weeks later, Trandahl would again alert Fordham about more contacts. Out of frustration, the sources said, Fordham contacted Palmer, hoping that an intervention from such a powerful figure in the House would persuade Foley to stop…
…Trandahl’s departure came within days of his confrontation with Foley over e-mails that the congressman had sent a former page. House aides say the circumstances of Trandahl’s exit were oddly quiet. The departure of a staff member of long standing, especially one as important as the House clerk, is usually marked with considerable fanfare, said Scott Lilly, a former Democratic staff director of the House Appropriations Committee. Debate is suspended in mid-afternoon to accommodate a stream of testimonials from lawmakers.
Trandahl’s departure was marked by a one-minute salute from Shimkus and a brief insert into the Congressional Record.
“My one-hour Special Order changed to a five-minute Special Order, now to a one-minute,” Shimkus said. “I just want to say thank you for the work you have done.”
Lilly said: “He seemed to suddenly disappear in a puff of smoke.”
Trandahl, now the executive director of the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, has not returned repeated phone calls and e-mails.
Congressional aides point to another factor that links Trandahl to the Foley matter. A member of the board of the national gay rights group Human Rights Campaign, Trandahl is openly homosexual and personally close to the now-disgraced former lawmaker, who announced through his lawyer this week that he is gay.
So, this guy Trandahl was openly gay while Foley was privately gay. Trandahl was on Foley’s case to knock off the flirtations with the pages. He kept bugging Foley’s chief of staff to get his man in line. This is in spite of the fact that Foley and Trandahl were ‘personally close’. When Foley’s chief of staff went to Hastert’s chief of staff, the next thing you know the House Clerk gets quietly shit-canned. And he won’t answer any phone calls now.
It doesn’t look good, my friends. It does not look good.
