The AP reports:
A senior congressional aide said Wednesday that he alerted House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office two years ago about worrisome conduct by former Rep. Mark Foley with teenage pages.
Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had “more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene.”
The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged.
An earlier story about Fordham’s resignation that appeared on ABC’s website said Fordham “had urged Republican leaders last spring not to raise questionable Foley e-mails with the full Congressional Page Board…” Clearly, Fordham didn’t want to be the fall guy. If he’s telling the truth, this just adds to the evidence that, at the very least, Hastert was asleep at the switch. Time will only tell how much Hastert actually knew, but the bottom line is that the more questions are raised, the more stories like this come out, the less time will be available for Republicans to get their message out on national security in the crucial weeks ahead of the election.