I'm adding a new category for blog posts: "Mark Foley Investigation"
A J Strata notes many inconsistencies in the emails from CREW, the Democrat-affiliated group said to have first obtained the Foley IM's.
Mac's Mind may have discovered the identity of the "anonymous" source who revealed the Jordan Edmund IM "prank" to Drudge yesterday. He thinks the source may be a former page appointed by ... Nancy Pelosi. The plot thickens.
Confederate Yankee gets a clarification about the IM's obtained by ABC News:
I asked: Were these instant messages given to Ross and the Staff of The Blotter directly by the pages, or were they filtered through an intermediary?
[Jeffrey W. Schneider of ABC News] gave an honest response that ABC News obtained the IMs from "former pages who contacted us after reading that first story."
What I should have asked, and what I actually meant to ask, was whether or not the pages who gave the IMs to ABC News were the same pages that participated in the instant messaging sessions, or if the IMs were turned over to ABC News by other Congressional pages who were not participants in the IMs.
I've asked Mr. Schneider if he would be kind enough to clarify this small but important distinction, and await his response.
Update: Mr. Schneider was kind enough to respond:
As we have reported, the IMs came to us from other pages.
Thus, we can clarify that the Congressional pages who were targeted by disgraced former Congressman Mark Foley were preyed upon twice; once by Foley, and for a second time by their fellow pages, who were the ones who turned the IMs over to ABC News.
Others may have caught this already, but it's news to me that this is confirmed. It seems that Drudge's story yesterday is indeed correct, at least as far as that the saved instant messages obviously got into the wrong hands.
But which page or pages sent the instant messages to ABC News?
The Wall Street Journal indeed confirmed that ABC's Brian Ross received additional IM's from other congressional pages after the story first broke.
So now I guess the question is, who has been involved in collecting all these IM's? The collection period seems to span years, so it is hard for me to believe that this was an accidental or coincidental effort. The most likely explanations are that 1) some pages did individually save IM's from Foley as "insurance" in case they were ever involved in a scandal when Foley's house of cards finally came tumbling down, or 2) a coordinated effort to discredit Foley has been ongoing for years, and in the process this effort has collected a vast number of Foley IM's from pages and others who wanted to see Foley taken down.
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