What and When Did Hasert Know About Foley? What About CREW?

Much is being written about Foleygate, Allahpundit seems to sum it up best:

Two strands of Foley e-mail messages have emerged in the past two days. One was the explicit, super-pervy “take off your boxers” strand that ABC revealed yesterday. The other was published the day before and was not explicit. It involved him asking a kid from Louisiana how he was holding up during Katrina, whether he had fun at a conference, what he wants for his birthday, and then telling him to “send me an email pic of you as well.” Which, I think we can all agree, is odd — the kid himself was apparently “freaked out” by it — but not something upon which we’d base an accusation of pedophilia without further evidence. In fact, as I said yesterday, I saw the Blotter item on Thursday afternoon and didn’t post on it because it “[s]ounded reasonably innocuous to me.” Turns out it wasn’t, but based on what I knew then, it didn’t necessarily suggest something untoward.

Flash forward to today. Tom Reynolds, the head of the National Republican Congressional Committee, says he told Hastert about the e-mails last year. Last year? Denny Hastert’s let a degenerate child predator roam the halls of Congress for a year without moving on it? Well, not exactly. Because as tomorrow’s page one of the New York Times reveals, Hastert apparently was made privy to only one of those two strands. And it wasn’t the one Democrats wish wish wish it was.

Yeah, I didn’t know of the sexually charged online exchanges when I declined to post that Blotter item on Thursday, either. You don’t throw a guy under the bus on the most serious accusation there is in American culture without a little better evidence than “send me a pic of you.”
As for what actions Hastert took, the Times fills in the blanks. FYI, “Alexander

Did Hastert do enough? In bizarro world, where he and Foley are both Democrats, yes. In our world — no, not nearly enough!
To be clear: if it turns out that Hastert or Boehner or whoever else knew about the sexual e-mails or knew that Foley had a history of being “overfriendly” with pages and chose not to investigate that, they’re done. But if this was the first they’d heard of it, then I think it’s time to send the firing squad home. High moral dudgeon over child abuse is a lovely thing, but we’ve got to be a little fair here.
Now that we’ve dispensed with that, go read this post at Moran’s and pay special attention to Update II. Who was ABC’s source for those e-mails? And for those e-mails? And for how long, exactly, was that source sitting on them while filthy Mark Foley was busy ogling the pages?

Rick Moran:

Reportedly the St Pete Times had the same information in August 2005 and wrote nothing about it either, apparently because the emails do not constitute illegal conduct, they are just creepy, and the boy’s parents did not wish to pursue this.

The far more damaging IM messages were released by CREW , the same “public interest” group which is representing the Wilson/Plames in their laughable suit against Cheney, et al.

When did they get the IM’s? Why did they wait until now to release them? Is there any indication the Republicans who looked into THIS MATTER had any knowledge of their(the IM’s) existence.Pardon an old lady’s suspicions. I’ve seen this dance too many times before.

I read this morning that a Monroe, LA newspaper also had the story and didn’t run with it because there appeared to be no impropriety.

And one more point that our dimwitted lefty friends can’t seem to wrap their miniscule brains around; the incident that was brought to the attention of the Page Board is unconnected to any of the raunchy, sick emails ABC news got from, as Clarice informs us, CREW.

Why the release of the emails and IM’s now is a question that answers itself 40 days before an election. And if it turns out that the GOP leadership is blameless in this – if Foley carried on his perversions in secret with only the terrified children knowing of his activities – then the question rightly arises why a Democrat connected organization allowed someone they knew as a pervert to continue to stalk children in the House of Representatives, failing to release the information until maximum political damage could be done to the opposition.

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