Updates will be in bold as more details come in
Here is a fairly complete and accurate timeline on Foleygate compiled by AP. The key missing elements are the claims by Aravosis and Rogers on when they were attmepting to basically blackmail Fordham and when they got Fordham to ‘out’ Foley (their claims Fordham denies). We also need to add the July 28th appearance of the mystery website and the KoS commenter WHintern’s postings about Foley. So here is the more complete version from sources around the net such as Gateway Pundit and Mac Ranger and Radar On Line [additions from blog reporting entries and modifications in italics:
- June 1997: Foley, a Florida Republican, reportedly writes sexually explicit instant messages to male ex-House Page Tyson Vivyan, who keeps the contacts a secret as he fends off Foley’s advances. Vivyan was 17 when the contacts begin, with the anonymous Foley making contact with Vivyan through Vivyan’s AOL account. [Note: corrected month from July to June].
- 1998, 2000, 2002: Three new claims of sexual approaches by Foley towards ex-Pages between 17-18 years old as reported by ABC News.
- 2003: Foley reportedly writes sexually explicit instant messages to a male House page. Reporting shows this may be contact with an ex-Page right around his 18th birthday.
- May 2003: Foley faces questions about his sexual orientation as he prepares to run for a Senate seat in Florida. He later drops out of the race.
- Before January 2004: Foley’s chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, [allegedly] has conversations with senior aides in House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office “asking them to intervene” to address Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward pages, according to Fordham.
- January 2004: Fordham leaves Foley’s office.
- July 2004: John Aravosis claims Fordham was his source for outing Rep Foley as a gay (which possibly ended his Senate run).
- July 2004: Mike Rogers posts an open letter to Fordham demanding he explain why he is supporting Mel Martinez.
- March 2005: Mike Rogers posts a rant against Foley which includes claims of Foley’s misbehavior with young men and predicts a big political scandal preceding the 2006 elections.
- July 29, 2005: Folely makes first email contact with the Page from Louisianna, which makes the Page uncomfortable after some other emails (the other emails are not dated).
- Aug 29, 2005: Hurricane Katrina hits LA.
- Aug 30-31, 2005: Louisianna Page contacts House Staffer regarding Foley’s overtures, supposedly passes on email at this time.
- Sep 13, 2005: Foley emails to LA Page are printed off by someone, these will be sent to Crew in May of 2006 via Fax.
- Oct 17, 2005: Email excgange between LA Page and House Staffer are printed off by someone, these will be sent to Crew in May of 2006 via Fax.
- Fall 2005: A former page contacts the office of his sponsor, Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., about e-mails he had received from Foley that asked about the boy’s age, then 16, and his birthday. Foley in one e-mail also requested a photo of the page.
- Alexander’s chief of staff calls House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office about the e-mail exchange. Alexander’s aide declines to show the message to Hastert’s staff and to the clerk of the House, who administers the page program, but says it is not of a sexual nature and that the family simply wants the contact to stop. Hastert said last week he was not aware of “a different set of communications which were sexually explicit … which Mr. Foley reportedly sent another former page or pages.”
- The clerk and Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., meet with Foley, who assures them he was only acting as a mentor to the boy. Shimkus, who chairs a House board that oversees the page program, orders Foley to cease contact with the boy and Foley agrees.
- Fordham, Foley’s former chief of staff, begins serving in the same capacity for Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Republican Campaign Committee.
- November 2005: The St. Petersburg Times says it assigned two reporters to investigate after being given copies of the e-mail exchange with the Louisiana teenager. The paper said Saturday it decided not to publish at the time because of the seriousness of what would be implied and because the boy and the family would not go on the record. The Miami Herald says it, too, had a copy of the e-mail but decided not to go public because the message was not sexually explicit and was subject to interpretation.
- Spring 2006: Alexander mentions the Foley situation to House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio. Alexander says Boehner refers him to Reynolds. Both Boehner and Reynolds say they talk with Hastert about it. Boehner quotes Hastert as telling him the Louisiana page’s complaint “had been taken care of.” Hastert says later he doesn’t recall the meeting with Boehner and the speaker’s staff says he did not learn of it until much later.
- May 29, 2006: CREW receives the Foley communications between the LA Page and Hill Staffer, as well as the Foley emails - via Fax. There may have been contact with CREW earlier in April according to the FBI].
- July 2006: Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington [CREW}, a liberal leaning watchdog group, obtains copies of Foley’s e-mails and gives them to the FBI. The FBI says later the initial group of e-mails did not rise to the level of a federal offense.
- July 2006: The mysterious website stopsexpredators.blogspot.com is created and begins innocuous and minor postings on July 28th.
- July 2006: John Aravosis receives copies of the emails from someone, and was at the time informed CREW had the emails and had submitted them to the FBI - making it likely he and CREW had the same source. H/T Flopping Aces.
- August 2006: Brian Ross claims he firsts has access to the less worrisome emails and is too busy to deal with them (though one could read his claim as being to busy with Katrina as Fall of 2005).
- Sept 05: Commenter WHInternNow posts at DailyKOS prescient comments about Foley and his acts with “young boys” - apparently the first to really break the story - before the website sighted as the original source.
- Sept 21: Website Stop Sex Predators posts on emails supposedly coming into the site from people with stories about Mark Foley.
- Sept. 24: Website Stop Sex Predators posts scans of the innocuous emails from Foley to the 16 year old Page which was the focus of activity back in the fall of 2005. Supposedly only a few people in Congress and the new media have access to these emails at this point in time.
- A whole 12 minutes after the website posts the scans, WHInternNow is back posting the news at DailyKOS. With limited readership at the site one wonders at how quickly WHInternNow found the scanned emails.
- Sept. 28: ABC News reports on the e-mail exchange with the Louisiana teenager. Foley’s Democratic challenger, Tim Mahoney, calls for an investigation into the exchange.
- Sept 28: John Aravosis posts his reaction to the news and admits he had the emails “several months ago”, which times in well with the July submission of the emails by CREW to the FBI.
- Sept. 29: Revelations emerge of sexually explicit instant messages Foley sent in 2003 to former pages. Foley resigns. The House votes to refer the matter to the ethics committee.
- Sept. 29: Mike Rogers posts on the DCCC website congragulations on taking his Foley lead and running with it. His comments are summarily deleted from the DCCC website but Rogers posts them on his site to gloat.
- Sept. 30: Hastert says he is setting up a hot line for current and former pages and their families to report problems about the page program.
- Oct. 1: Hastert writes a letter to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking for an investigation of Foley’s conduct. Hastert writes a similar letter to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. An FBI spokesman confirms the agency is “conducting an assessment to see if there’s been a violation of federal law.”
- Oct. 2: Foley’s attorney, David Roth, says the former congressman is battling alcoholism and has checked into a rehabilitation facility.
- Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asks the Justice Department to investigate why the Foley e-mails they gave the FBI were not pursued.
- Oct. 3: The Washington Times calls in an editorial for Hastert to resign as speaker. Hastert says he won’t resign. President Bush says he supports Hastert’s call for an investigation and says he was “shocked and dismayed” at Foley’s behavior. Boehner talks about conferring with Hastert in the spring about Foley.
- Roth says at a news conference in West Palm Beach, Fla., that Foley was molested as a child by a member of the clergy but had never had sexual contact with a minor. He says Foley asked him to reveal publicly that Foley is gay.
- Oct. 4: Fordham announces he is resigning as Reynolds’ chief of staff and tells The Associated Press he had conversations with House leadership about Foley’s behavior prior to January 2004.
- The Justice Department orders the House to preserve Foley’s official computer files. A law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the ongoing investigation says that FBI agents are interviewing participants in the House page program.
- The Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirms that it has begun its own preliminary inquiry into Foley’s e-mail contacts with House pages.
- Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., calls for a group of former senators and others to investigate how the House handled the Foley matter.
- Oct 6: Drudge breaks the news that the sallacious IM messages from 2003 involving Jordan Edmund are not real, were a prank, and landed in the hands of Democrat operatives which set up the fake scandal.
If I missed some key event please let me know in the comments and I will add it. I believe there were more times when Rogers gloated. But one can see there was a lot of activity right around the time the story was timed to break - and before it did so!