The Foley Scandal & Those Dirty Rotten Hasterts

If you had told me 10 years ago that two of my three favorite magazines a decade hence would be Popular Mechanics and Vanity Fair, I would have said you were nuts.

Well, nuts to me, because both magazines are publishing some of the best stuff around, PM on science and technology and VF because of its stable of great investigative journalists. (My third favorite mag is The New Yorker.)

VF has put up its latest bombshell -- a lengthy piece by Gail Sheehy and Judy Bachrach on the Mark Foley scandal -- from its forthcoming January 2007 issue on its website, and outgoing House Speaker Dennis Hastert gets a well deserved drubbing.

Write Sheehy and Bachrach :

"Hastert, believing the leadership needed to present a united front, as one by one his colleagues were repudiating his foggy recollections, called a Republican-leadership meeting. That same day, an ethics-committee investigation was pressed for by Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi (over the objections of those who wanted an independent counsel), its purpose to discover who knew what when about Foley. Blunt, Boehner, and Reynolds were all summoned 'to basically get their stories straight for the press,' according to a knowledgeable source, who adds, 'That to me is where Hastert attempted a cover-up.'

"Reynolds balked at having such a meeting. 'This is stupid! We can't all go and meet privately and try to get our stories straight, because this matter was just referred to the ethics committee,' he told Hastert, according to the same source. 'In fact, none of us are supposed to be talking to each other, because we are not supposed to talk to potential witnesses.' Worse, added Reynolds, 'I can tell you anything we say at this leadership meeting is something we have to share with the ethics committee.'

"The meeting eventually became a conference call, but without Reynolds's participation."

More here.