Who Knew What, When

Flopping Aces said he saw Dick Morris making a starling charge last night on Hannity & Colmes.

It's hearsay evidence at best.

Morris says he was told by a "respected reporter" has proof that a senior Democratic member of Congress knew about Foley's sexually explicit instant messages to House pages months ago.

It remains to be seen if there is any validity to this charge. If a reporter (and that's a big "if") has such evidence, then that reporter has a moral obligation to come forward with the story. If the evidence is reasonably solid, then we would be looking at a situation where at least one Democrat knew that a sexual predator was preying upon theses teens, and did nothing for months to warn the House leadership or law enforcement of Foley's actions for obvious political gain.

Which brings me back to my questions yesterday that disappeared at the ABC News blog, The Blotter.

The questions were:

• when did Ross become aware of the existence of these instant messages?
• were these instant messages given to Ross and the Staff of The Blotter directly by the pages, or were they filtered through an intermediary?

We know that Brian Ross of ABC News has been the lead journalist on this story, and that Ross's ABC News team has compiled at least 52 separate instant messages between Foley and House pages. It seems logical that if Morris really did make the claim that a respected reporter knew of a senior House Democrat sitting on this claim, that Brian Ross, as the reporter most immersed in this story, is likely the reporter to which Morris refers.

Update: Jonah G. has the transcript (my bold):

HANNITY: All right, perhaps, but we'll examine that in the next segment. But I think more importantly here there's some fundamental, I think, fairness issues here.

Everybody that I know is glad Foley is gone, but there seems to be an issue here to purposefully politicize this issue, and I find that equally repugnant to me. And, more importantly, I think this takes on a whole new dimension, and this is it, that, if in the pursuit of political power you are going to falsely accuse individuals of knowing things about horrible scandals like this, you better have evidence, because we live in America, and those American people you're describing are fair-minded.

MORRIS: And that's going to back fire.

HANNITY: And when innocent people are smeared, Dick, I've got to believe that people would tend to side with the people that are being smeared. And I see that this is happening more and more in this scandal.

MORRIS: And that's going to back fire on the Democrats by focusing on what did Hastert know, because you know that some of the Democratic congressmen knew. I had a reporter who told me today that she knows that one very prominent member of the Democratic leadership knew about this for months. And it came out through...

HANNITY: That's a big story.

MORRIS: ... a left-wing — came out — yes, but it's up to her to break it. And came...

ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST: But, Dick, it's the Republican leadership we're dealing with here. It's their leadership.

MORRIS: Yes. I mean, the Democratic leadership knew, was what she told me. And I think that, obviously, it came out through a liberal Web site, and obviously it was fed to ABC through one of their more liberal channels. And obviously there were Democratic fingerprints on it.

But I don't think that the public is going to care much about what Hastert knew and what the Democratic leadership knew and any of that. They are going to focus on the details of this scandal, and they'll be very glad that it came out, and they will feel that it epitomizes what's wrong with Congress.

COLMES: All right, Dick, we only have a few moments here before we have to break again. But, look, this actually appeared on a Web site, "Stop Sexual Predators." I don't know that that's a liberal Web site.

We know that the Democrat in the page program in Congress was not informed. Only the Republicans knew. To actually put any blame for this on the Democratic leadership, as if they should have done something, when it's clear the Republican leadership didn't, is really not taking responsibility where it belongs.

MORRIS: Listen, I hate to take both of you on at once, but you're both missing the point. This is not a Democratic or a Republican scandal. It's a congressional scandal.

Well, the pronoun "she" and "her" seems to blow my Brian Ross theory all to Hell unless Morris was intentionally misdirecting attention away from his source. The fact remains that Morris willing to go on the record and say that Congress is to blame here, not just one party. Knowing how dirty both parties can be, that seems an honest assessment.

Now it is a matter of determining which other bums in addition to Foley need to be thrown out, and I suspect there are one or two more on both sides of the aisle. Anyone who knew about Foley's IMs (the emails were too ambiguous to act upon) to these pages and withheld that knowledge for any reason is little better than Foley himself, and is an accessory after the fact.