hot document: Primary sources exposed and explained.

More IMs from Rep. Mark Foley

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from: Timothy Noah

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006, at 6:17 PM ET

The instant messages sent by Rep. Mark Foley, R., Fla., just keep coming. Foley quit Congress on Sept. 29 shortly after ABC News sought comment on some raunchy IMs he sent to past and present congressional pages (including this 2003 exchange with a former page who was still a minor, which ABC News posted on its Web site; previously, a much less explicit correspondence with another ex-page was posted here). ABC News has since posted several additional IM exchanges on its Web site. These appear below and on the following two pages.

The scandal's reverberations are starting to spread. Foley's former chief of staff, Kirk Fordham, resigned Oct. 4 as chief of staff to Rep. Tom Reynolds, R., N.Y., chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, which raises money for GOP candidates for Congress. Reynolds, who is taking heat for not moving more aggressively when warned about Foley's behavior this past spring, says that he told House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R., Ill. This assertion, combined with a similar one from House Majority Leader John Boehner, R., Ohio, is putting pressure on Hastert to resign. Fordham, meanwhile, says he told Hastert's chief of staff more than two years ago that Foley's behavior toward the pages seemed inappropriate. (A Hastert spokesman denies it.) Like Foley, Fordham is gay, which may enhance his appeal to GOP leaders as a fall guy for the scandal.

Now to the IMs. We begin with an exchange from April 2003 between Foley and an underage former page. It occurred just as Foley was being called to vote on a defense appropriation.

ABC News declined to release what follows next, instead summarizing it as follows: "The exchange continues in which Foley and the teen both appear to describe having sexual orgasms."

We now resume our previously scheduled programming:

hot document
entries
123
from: Timothy Noah

Posted Wednesday, Oct. 4, 2006, at 6:17 PM ET
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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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