The End of Denny?

It's starting to seem like House Speaker Denny Hastert has one foot on a banana peel and the other on a roller skate.

Hastert's statements of last week regarding serial creep former Congressman Mark Foley are being revealed as the bald-faced lies they probably were. It now seems obvious that Hastert knew all about Foley's obsession with congressional pages for years, and chose to do nothing rather than jeopardize a safe congressional seat.

The AP is reporting today that senior congressional aide named Kirk Fordham told Speaker Hastert three years ago about Foley's problem with teenage pages. Hastert and others have made conflicting statements about when they first heard about this situation, but if Fordham's statement is true, and the speaker sat on this information for three years, then Hastert is toast. I'm starting to wonder whether he can last out the week.

On the other hand, John Hawkins in Human Events Online defends Denny Hastert's handling (if that's what you want to call it) of L'Affaire Foley (or L'Affaire Folie, if you want to be cute about it):

"Look at the situation he was put in back in 2005. He has someone come to him with slightly creepy, inappropriate e-mails from a congressman to a page. But the e-mails weren’t sexual, weren’t illegal, weren’t an ethics breach, and Foley didn't ask for a meeting with the page.

So, what is Hastert supposed to do about this other than have Foley told not to contact the page in question any more? Could he contact the Capitol Hill Police? Well, again, the emails weren't criminal. Could he refer the matter to the ethics committee? Why? There was no ethical breach. There have been suggestions that Hastert should have started an investigation into Foley's sex life, but that's ridiculous given what he had to work with. If you're going to start peering through someone's files, listening in on his phone calls, and asking dozens of people questions like, "Has Mark Foley ever touched you or made inappropriate sexual advances," then you better have more evidence than an e-mail asking a page for a picture."

Of course, Hawkins is apparently not considering the possibility that Hastert knew about this two years before 2005. It'll be interesting to see what he says, if anything, when he finds out.

Tom Moran