We know you kids can’t get enough of this Mark Foley scandal, so here’s link to The Advocate‘s Q&A with Kurt Wolfe, the reporter who outed Foley in an Advocate article a decade ago.
While the entire thing’s a good read, what we find particularly interesting is that one of Wolfe’s sources in the story was a congressional page who Foley had sent sexually explicit emails. Wolfe says:
One of our sources for Foley had been a [congressional] page. He was an adult when I was speaking to him, but he was a minor when he was a page. He told me that he had been the recipient of many inappropriate sexual communications from Foley. That changed the whole story. I contacted [Foley’s] offices for comment. I told them that we were running the story and that one of our sources was a former male page. The response was pretty nasty and ended with a hang-up. Now the angle is now “who knew what, when.” I can’t [attest] to the current [GOP] leadership [knowledge], but I can [attest] to Foley’s staff. They were notified.
We wish we could say that we’re shocked by this revelation, but we’re not. What we are a bit surprised by is that Wolfe didn’t follow his journalistic instincts and delve deeper into the situation. We would have been on that story like stink on shit.