Covering Up for Foley? [1]
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton [2] on
Republicans in the U.S. Congress continue to grapple with the controversy surrounding the resignation in disgrace of Rep. Mark Foley [3]. Former Foley chief of staff Kirk Fordham, who subsequently became chief of staff to Rep. Tom Reynolds [4] (chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee [5]), has resigned following reports that he tried to stop ABC News from reporting [6] on the sexually explicit chats that Foley had with teenagers about the Grand Old Party in his pants. But Fordham seems unwilling to play the role of fall guy in the cover-up scandal. In a news conference he told reporters that he had been warning people about Foley since 2003 or earlier, holding "more than one conversation with senior staff [7] at the highest levels of the House of Representatives, asking them to intervene when I was informed of Mr. Foley’s inappropriate behavior." As the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz observes, "That's what's driving this whole thing [8], the sense that key Republicans were more concerned with the politics of the Foley mess than protecting the teenagers he was hitting up online."