The House Ethics Committee Report includes new information that top Democrats were also aware in 2005 of Mark Foley’s inappropriate e-mails to congressional pages at about the same time as outgoing Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office was informed.While the report is critical of Hastert and his staff for not taking sufficient action, nowhere is there any evidence that the Democrats followed up.
So reports Rhonda Schwartz from ABC. [1]
According to the Committee’s report, “the communications directors for both the House Democratic Caucus and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee” in the fall of 2005 also had copies of e-mails written by Mark Foley to a congressional page, which the high school student described as “sick, sick, sick, sick.”
Now, think about this. Why on earth would the Democrats not take this golden opportunity to dis a Republican in a contested district? The answer can only be that their method of obtaining said documents, would be discovered. If I recall correctly, there was an awful lot in the way of document leakage from one side of the house to the other this last time around. It was said, that this was one of the reasons that the republicans were less effective than they might have been.
In short, they got the goods on Foley, by illicit means… Means they didn’t want to lose the advantage of. In short, their political advantage, was worth more to them than ‘saving the children’.
Joyner [2] raises another in my view less likely possibility :
The only way politics could explain the Democrats’ keeping silent for so long was to keep it for closer to the election, which would be repugnant. That did not happen, however; the information was leaked by a Republican.