Istook aide may be victim in page scandal ("Victim" Hires Major Defense Lawyer?)

A former U.S. House page working on the gubernatorial campaign of Republican Rep. Ernest Istook may be a part of the scandal involving former Congressman Mark Foley, The Oklahoman has learned.

The former page, a Californian named Jordan Edmund, on Wednesday hired Enid attorney Stephen Jones to represent him, the attorney confirmed.

Jones would not say exactly why he was hired, but did say, “I understand the FBI and the House Ethics committee have an interest in the matter ... the allegations concerning Congressman Foley which have surfaced.”

Foley, a Republican from Florida, resigned abruptly on Friday after it was learned that he exchanged sexually explicit e-mails with former pages. The FBI is investigating.

Istook’s campaign manager, Chip Englander, who is also from California, declined comment Wednesday to an Oklahoman reporter.

However, Englander gave The Oklahoman a statement that was attributed to Istook.

The statement says, “The sad and sick behavior of Mark Foley was a total surprise to me when it was revealed. Law enforcement is doing its job, and I support that effort. Now we should all support and protect the victims, and they should not be hounded by the press.

“It was a complete surprise to learn this morning that one victim may be someone I know. Each one of the victims deserves their privacy. To every reporter I request, please have the decency to avoid making things worse for the victims, and just leave them alone. This happened years ago when the victims were minors.”

Edmund’s name surfaced on Internet “blogs” that linked him to the instant message address used in communications with Foley.

One blogger got the instant message address from the Web site of ABC News, which has obtained the instant messages sent between Foley and a former page.

In the sequence of messages identified by the blogger, Foley tells the person to “strip down and get relaxed.”

It is not clear whether Foley’s other instant messages, including one in which he apparently conducted “instant message” sex with a person, were all to the same person.

Asked why Edmund needed an attorney, Jones said, “You read the blogs. You know why he needs an attorney.”

Jones, who represented Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in his murder trial in Denver, confirmed Edmund was a U.S. House page.

“I’ve been retained in the last several hours,” Jones said. “I’m still reviewing matters.”

On that page, he identified himself as being 21 years old and said he had been attending college at the University of California at Berkeley. He said he was going to Oklahoma to be deputy campaign manager for Istook’s gubernatorial effort, the Web site stated.

The House Ethics Committee is scheduled to hold a closed-door meeting this morning about the Foley matter.

Rep. Tom Cole, R-Moore, one of the 10 members of the committee, flew back to Washington on Wednesday for what he called an “emergency meeting.”

He said the committee today would not hear from witnesses but would set the parameters of the investigation.

Contributing: Staff Writers Joe Wertz, Bryan Dean, Jennifer Mock and Ryan McNeill

It looks like 2 different layers/levels of Blackmail may be at work here.

The first level is the Blackmail perpetrated upon Foley's closeted-gay staffer, Fordham, by Rogers and John Aravosis of America’s Blog.

As has been documented by the macsmind blog, "both are gay activists who on many occasions have threatened not only Foley and Fordham with outing, but others as well. These guys are what we call “Political Thugs”, the only thing they don’t use is guns, but they do nearly as much damage. Others call it by it’s real name - blackmail."

The blackmail /"outing threat" letter they sent to Fordham, which is fairly overt in its blackmail intent, has been posted in this thread.

So -- when Brian Ross and others report that an "intermediary" has provided documentation of Foley's misbehavior, and that the documentation was "provided" by a republican staffer, Ross (knowlingly) falsely implies that repubs are leaking the information and that the intermediary and the staffer are both republicans and working in concert.

Whereas -- the truth may well be that the operatives described above extracted that information from Fordham through extortion/threat/blackmail. THEY are the so called "intermediary", and note that Ross conspicuously never offers or clarifies the political affiliation of the "intermediary".

So that's Blackmail Level 1. Now how would Level 2 work?

The intermediary, in the early stages of the blackmailing effort, gets from Fordham some Foley e-mails and starts to contact the pages, and lo and behold discovers among the Foley pages an ambitious and cunning young man, who you have been describing here tonight. The young man is gay, as are the intermediaries. The pieces begin to fall together.

The intermediary begins to see where the endgame can play out as an October surprise.

The intermediary wants to create the impression that Foley's office is performing political favors for the young ex-page.
At the same time, the young ex-page is ambitious and hustling to get a resume building job managing a real campaign.

The intermediary leans on Fordham to "make it happen" and buy the page's silence by getting him the campaign manager job, and it appears that the Foley office has strong links to the Istook office, so that's where the page was placed.

The page may not be fully aware of the leverage that was applied, but knows at a minimum that he has, in the intermediaries, an "angel" that is making good things happen - and in return the page provides further salacious details to the intermediaries, tightening their grip on Fordham and Foley.

Finally, once the ballot is set and Foley is effectively not replaceable on the ballot, the trap is sprung by the intermediary, who goes to Brian Ross at ABC to drop his bomb.

Ross, always ambitious himself, perhaps decides to up the ante by re-framing the story as not just a Foley matter, but a Hastert matter.

But that is creating a problem for his story -- the story is just too big now to stand up to scrutiny, and the pajamahadeen have been roused.

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Istook aide may be victim in page scandal

WOW !