Foley likely won't be prosecuted, amid failure by media to report on email soliciting male page

[meegbear]

Former Republican congressman Mark Foley, whose e-mails and instant messages caused uproar and became the butt of a thousand jokes, might have scored yet again.

According to ABC, Florida laws may spare the congressman because of the state's three-year statute of limitations.

Florida did not start a criminal investigation of Foley until November 2006, making it "nearly impossible to prosecute" an explicit instant message Foley sent to a 17-year-old high school student in 2003.

Who's to blame?

House Republican leadership, for one, who had knowledge of Foley's inappropriate behavior for years. The emails originally leaked out of the office of Rep. Rodney Alexander (R-LA), a Democrat-cum-Republican who changed parties in 2004. But the untold story is that the media, too, had a hand in protecting Foley.

The messages first crossed the desk of the St. Petersburg Times in 2005. RAW STORY is also aware, through various sources, that ABC had elements of the Foley story a year prior to the article's release.

The critical instant message conversation cited by law enforcement, however, did not emerge until after ABC published their story in August 2006. Harper's Magazine also admitted they had received the first batch of "over-friendly" emails a month earlier.

St. Petersburg Times Executive Editor Neil Brown defended his decision not to run the Foley story after they received "creepy" messages from a Louisiana page in which Foley was seeking a photograph.

"I led deliberations with our top editors, and we concluded that we did not have enough substantiated information to reach beyond innuendo," Brown wrote in an October 2006 editorial. "We couldn't come up with a strong enough case to explain to a teenager's parents why, over their vehement pleas to drop the matter, we needed to make their son the subject of a story - and the incredible scrutiny that would surely follow.

"It added up to this conclusion," Brown added. "To print what we had seemed to be a shortcut to taint a member of Congress without actually having the goods."

Lane Hudson, the former Human Rights Campaign staffer who first posted the emails online -- the posting which spurred ABC into running a story -- said he was not surprised.

"The fact that Foley's getting away with it is symptomatic of how things work in Washington," Hudson said. "Republicans in Congress knew about it for years and did nothing about it, the FBI did nothing about it, and the media failed in its responsibility to properly investigate it."

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http://rawstory.com//news/2007/Foley_likely_wont_be_prosecuted_amid_0914.html

[meegbear]

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