A student at the University of Michigan has told the Michigan Daily that former Rep. Mark Foley got his attention five years ago, when he was a page. Richard Nguyen, a first-year student at the university's Gerald Ford School of Public Policy, said he saw Foley make "inappropriate contact" with another page on the House floor, the Daily reports.
"I wasn't sure if it was a social norm I wasn't accustomed to," Nguyen told the Daily. "I mean, you see athletes patting each other's asses all the time on the field."
Well, people do say politics is a sport.
But Nguyen thinks of the page program as a learning experience, he told the Daily, and he wants it to be preserved. In that fight, he joins a University of Texas sophomore who has just launched a lobbying group that hopes to go to Washington speak on the program's behalf, the Daily Texan reports.
Foley Cruising in His BMW; Another Dorm Visit in 2000
October 11, 2006 11:33 AM
Rhonda Schwartz Reports:
A staff supervisor at the dorm for congressional pages intervened when former Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL) tried to pay the teens a nighttime visit in the summer of 2000, ABC News has learned.
The pages were having an informal "mixer" party in their dorm at the Tip O'Neil building behind the Capitol, according to a former page who was 17 at the time.
"It was a beautiful summer evening, and I recall Mr. Foley arriving in his blue Series 3 BMW convertible about 9:30 at night," the former page said. "Several of us saw him and went outside to chat."
A page program supervisor came out to warn the pages "not to go far because they weren't signed out" and shooed them back inside, he recalled.
The page supervisor was one of the adult staffers who worked for the House Clerk's office, which oversees the page program. It is not known if any formal report was filed regarding Foley's surprise visit.
The former page, who spoke to ABC News on the condition he not be identified, said he then began receiving instant messages and e-mails from Foley which became sexually explicit immediately following his 18th birthday.
He said he has not retained any of the messages or e-mails.
"I would turn on my instant messenger, and he would be online at all hours of the day or night. The talk would quickly turn sexual," he said. He says Foley requested that he send photos of himself performing sexual acts.
According to Newsweek Magazine, it was the report of a similar nighttime visit by an inebriated Foley to the page dorm sometime in 2002 or 2003 that caused Foley's then Chief of Staff, Kirk Fordham, to alert Speaker Hastert's office to the congressman's inappropriate actions, a warning Hastert's office now says they never received.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/10/foley_cruising_.html
Interesting....got some contacts down at UT....let me see what I can find out later.
Instincts tell me they are throwing stuff up against the wall at this point so we will follow whatever is tossed. Don't take the bait.
Keep your eyes on the 'principle actors' folks...and it is not Soros & Co. at this point.
Sure would be interesting though to find out what lobbying group this kid is tied to........