Update: Foley Reported Nearly One Year Ago & Republican House Leadership Involved

This courtesy of the DailyKOS:

This congressional sex scandal has just hit blockbuster status: according to the Associated Press, the Foley behavior towards pages was known nearly a year ago, and the House Leadership took no action:

Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-La., who sponsored the page from his district, told reporters that he learned of the e-mails from a reporter some months ago and passed on the information to Rep. Thomas Reynolds, R-N.Y., chairman of the House Republican campaign organization.Alexander said he did not pursue the matter further because "his parents said they didn't want me to do anything."

Carl Forti, a spokesman for the GOP campaign organization, said Reynolds learned from Alexander that the parents did not want to pursue the matter. Forti said, however, that the matter did go before the House Page Board -- the three lawmakers and two House officials who oversee the pages.

It was unclear what the officials did.

The board currently is headed by Rep. John Shimkus, R-Ill., who did not respond to requests for an interview. [...]

Efforts to reach the boy were unsuccessful, but he told the St. Petersburg Times last November, "I thought it was very inappropriate. After the one about the picture, I decided to stop e-mailing him back." The Times didn't publish the comments until Friday.

Alexander said the boy notified a staffer in his office about the e-mails. The congressman said he learned of it from a reporter 10 or 11 months ago and promptly called the boy's parents.

"My concern then was the young man's interests and the parents' interests," Alexander said Friday. "We weren't trying to protect anybody except the parents. ... They told me they were comfortable with it and didn't want to pursue anything, didn't want to talk about it anymore."


This is huge. The number of Republican representatives who knew about the Foley advances towards young pages nearly a year ago appears to include House Speaker Dennis Hastert; Tom Reynolds; John Shimkus; Alexander; and as Josh Marshall points out, Tom Delay and/or Roy Blunt.

Jesus. They knew for nearly a year, and covered it up. The "corruption" frame just got a hell of a lot more serious. Today, Dennis Hastert said an investigation would be forthcoming. I'll bet he's right, and I'll bet he's going to be one of the ones investigated -- because he knew of it ten months ago.

Update:

See post below for more info. Via Josh Marshall, the News Star, of Louisiana, is reporting that Republican Majority Leader John Boehner was also informed by Alexander of Foley's behavior.

That makes between seven and nine Republican Congressmen, minimum, that had been informed.

Huge story. May be the story for the next month.