The House Republican leadership knew of now-ex-Rep. Mark Foley’s inappropriate e-mails to Congressional pages a year ago, and ABC News didn’t report on them until the end of this last week — but if you were reading the right blogs, you’d have gotten wind of it nearly a month ago: As Clarice Feldman, Tom Maguire and others are pointing out today, the Stop Sex Predators blog that first made the Mark Foley e-mails available last week is highly suspicious, to say the least, as is Daily Kos two-comment wonder WHInternNow, who first mentioned Foley’s page problem on Sept. 5:
They are probably also the same person: On Sept. 24, WHInternNow posted a dKos diary about the SSP posts almost as soon as the scans went up, but claimed to have innocently stumbled upon them via Google. Yeah, right.
And earlier this last week, before ABC’s Brian Ross obtained the more-damning Foley IMs and took the story national, Wonkette’s Alex Pareene took notice of SSP’s e-mails, and was uncharacteristically constrained in deeming the e-mails false (somehow I don’t think Nick Denton is paying him to be responsible). To be fair, the skepticism was certainly warranted. Feldman explains why:
In July a blog appeared, designed it said to trace sex predators. Few posts were made in that month or the following month. All recounted years old stories. Then on September 18, the blog printed the fairly innocuous email exchange [Note: That is not how I'd characterize them.] between Congressman Foley and an unnamed page. … How likely is it that this site with virtually no readership , few posts and hardly any history or posts of interest suddenly receives this bombshell? I’d say slight. About as likely as Lucy Ramirez handing Burkett Bush’s TANG papers.
Yesterday morning, I sent a message to stopsexpredators@gmail.com asking whether they could dissuade me from my own suspicion that the site was created in late July with the intent of eventually releasing the Foley e-mails. Needless to say, I haven’t received a response.
What I find interesting — baffling, really — is this: Why did the blog’s creator(s) even bother with the unpersuasive posting history? Why fake it if you can’t be convincing? As we’re seeing, it didn’t take very long for questions to arise about the source of this information. This hack job only makes it more likely it came from an interested DC group rather than, say, the pages who received them in the first place. If SSP’s author had merely posted them to a brand new Blogspot page without the shoddy posting history, the Foley e-mails might’ve been taken more seriously. At least the situation doesn’t lack for irony: The facts reported by the blog appear to be legitimate, while the blog itself appears to not be. Is this a new variation on that storied phrase, “fake but accurate”?
Questions also remain about why this blogger didn’t release the explicit IMs. One possibility is that they didn’t have the IMs — but considering the deliberately clandestine moves by SSP’s anonymous author, this seems unlikely. Feldman fingers the lefty watchdog group CREW as a possible source for the IM conversations, and it certainly is their kind of issue — but evidence is lacking. For want of a better explanation — and Foley’s hometown paper sure isn’t providing it — I’m inclined to go with Maguire here:
Maybe the blog author was an unwitting catspaw, but I would want some assurance that this was not simply a successful attempt to promote a story that wasn’t quite ready for the Mainstream Media by laundering it through some blogs.
If we’re defining success as getting the story into the mainstream media without the source being publicly identified, then yes, it was a success. If success is defined as getting the story into the blogosphere without the vehicle being identified as an impostor, not so much.
P.S. The House Republican leadership is already on the hot seat over its previous investigation into the matter, even with partisan Republicans. (So too is the St. Pete Times, but their editors aren’t coming up for election soon.)
Lately, conservatives have resigned themselves to hoping the Republicans would lose control of the House, as a necessary measure to put the party back on the right track — but one imagines they didn’t want it to happen quite like this.
P.P.S. This is not at all surprising. It sounds like it was conventional wisdom on the Hill that Foley was bad news for underage Hill staffers, which makes it all the more interesting that neither the St. Pete Times nor the House leadership asked enough questions. The left is attacking Hastert et al, and the right is attacking the media. They’re probably both right.
