ABC – Fair And Balanced

Spending so much time fighting Spam Wars (maybe John Williams could write a theme song for that?) I missed writing about a number of things. One was the long awaited political hit piece report about Mark Foley's emails. Not surprisingly, the headlines from almost all media outlets are screaming that the GOP didn't stop Foley. Or didn't do enough or should have done more. You get the picture. What is very surprising indeed is that ABC reports, right up front,  the other little fact from the report: The Democrats also knew and also did nothing at all.

The House Ethics Committee Report includes new information that top Democrats were also aware in 2005 of Mark Foley's inappropriate e-mails to congressional pages at about the same time as outgoing Speaker Dennis Hastert's office was informed.

While the report is critical of Hastert and his staff for not taking sufficient action, nowhere is there any evidence that the Democrats followed up. 

According to the Committee's report, "the communications directors for both the House Democratic Caucus and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee" in the fall of 2005 also had copies of e-mails written by Mark Foley to a congressional page, which the high school student described as "sick, sick, sick, sick."

ABC is also a bit unhappy that the mention of the Democrat's knowledge is not followed up, all the beating time is spent on Dennis Hastert and other in the Republican party. It sounds like there was plenty of blame to go around, but the report focuses on a one sided attack.

But while the report is highly critical of the shortcomings of Hastert and the Republican leadership, there is no follow-up to the brief one sentence mention on page 76 that powerful Democratic committees also knew about the e-mails except to note that Matt Miller, the House Democratic Caucus staff member, sent the e-mails at some point to various news organizations.

The AP article mentions the one mention of the Democrat's knowledge with one mention of their own. It is not that nobody reported it, it is that there was no follow-up, either by the committee or by the media. To the best of my knowledge from reading the news reports, the committee also appears to have not addressed the issue of the timing of the release of the news. And the report says that no rules were broken and no punishments are warranted.