Any possibility that the Mark Foley sex scandal would start slowing down disappeared this afternoon as the intra-party implosion proceeds apace.
First up, Kirk Fordham, NRCC Chairman’s Tom Reynolds’s chief of staff, has been made a scapegoat. Fordham, who apparently tried to suppress the most incriminating evidence against Foley by approaching ABC News about a “deal,” after he learned about the sexually-explicit IM content, was “forced out” of his job this afternoon.
[S]ources said Fordham, a former chief of staff for Congressman Mark Foley, had urged Republican leaders last spring not to raise questionable Foley e-mails with the full Congressional Page Board, made up of two Republicans and a Democrat.
“He begged them not to tell the page board,” said one of the Republican sources.
People familiar with Fordham’s side of the story, however, said Fordham was being used as a scapegoat by Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert.
They said Fordham had repeatedly warned Hastert’s staff about Foley’s “problem” with pages, but little was done.
The GOP’s latest line, apparently, is that the whole mess if Fordham’s fault. Based on this new version of events, Fordham “interfered” with the process, but neither Reynolds nor Hastert knew what was going on.
Indeed, Republicans seem to be embracing the shift-blame-downwards tack rather enthusiastically. Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) said, “The people that should have acted more responsively are actually staff people. They should have brought this to the attention of the speaker.” Yes, right, the poor Speaker was left in the dark … except for all the people who kept trying to warn him about Foley.
And speaking of the Speaker, Hastert isn’t having a good day, either.
For example, Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-La.), whose former page helped start this controversy last week, said Hastert “knew about the e-mails that we knew about,” including one in which Foley asked the page to send his picture. (Shortly thereafter, Alexander reversed course and said Hastert didn’t know about the emails, adding that he discussed the emails with Hastert’s aides, not the Speaker himself.)
One man who may have his eyes on Hastert’s job, meanwhile, has decided he’d like to at least try to throw the Speaker under the bus.
Republicans have been struggling to put the scandal behind them, but another member of the leadership, Rep Roy Blunt of Missouri, said pointedly during the day he would have handled the entire matter differently than Speaker Dennis Hastert did, had he known about it.
“I think I could have given some good advice here, which is you have to be curious. You have to ask all the questions you can think of,” Blunt said. “You absolutely can’t decide not to look into activities because one individual’s parents don’t want you to.”
I feel like we almost need a scorecard here. Let’s see, Boehner blames Hastert, Blunt blames Hastert, Reynolds blames Hastert and blames his staff, Hastert blames Reynolds, Alexander sort of blames Hastert but isn’t sure, the right-wing blames gays, LaHood blames lawmakers’ inability to stay away from teenagers, and Foley blames alcohol and an unknown minister whom he alleges molested him 40 years ago.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, has ordered House officials to “preserve all records” related to Foley’s electronic correspondence with teenagers. Stay tuned.