Washington Post: Democratic Operatives Shopped Foley Scandal Months Ago

At least two Democratic operatives were shopping Foley emails months before the scandal broke, according to this Washington Post story:

But there are indications that Democrats spent months circulating five less insidious Foley e-mails to news organizations before they were finally published by ABC News late last month, which prompted the leaking of the more salacious instant messages. Harper's Magazine said yesterday that it obtained the five e-mails from a Democratic Party operative, albeit in May, long before the election season.

The most sexually explicit material -- the instant messages that forced Foley's abrupt resignation on Sept. 29 and turned his actions into a full-fledged scandal -- appears to be disconnected from politics. The two former pages who revealed the correspondence to ABC News and The Washington Post, however, may never have come forward had Democratic operatives not divulged the five more benign e-mails that Foley had sent to a Louisiana boy.

AJ Strata speculates that the newspaper is trying to get out ahead of some damaging revelation, and notes that they have their timeline wrong:

Again, more confirmation from WaPo that (a) a Democrat operative was the source of the less salacious emails and (b) this story was shopped from November 2005 to August 2006. And even then the WaPo is somehow working off an erroneous timeline. The very first Foley email is the one where he asks “Do I have the right email?” and is dated July 29, 2005 - not 2004 as the post ‘reports’. It is this kind of simple misreporting which has been the hallmark of this entire scandal.

Could it be that allegations of a planned "October Surprise" are true, and the Washington Post knows it?

It bears mention that none of this would be coming out now, if not for the investigative work of William "Wild Bill" Kerr of the blog Passionate America, who revealed the identity of the page with whom Foley had his most notorious communications. It was Kerr who discovered that the former page, Jordan Edmund, was over 18 at the time of the incident, a fact that ABC originally misreported. ABC then quietly changed the wording of their "Blotter" report, without mentioning the "update".

Kerr has been criticized for revealing the name, but maintains, convincingly, that his story would have gotten little notice without the blockbuster revelation of the page's identity. Some A-list bloggers have deliberately snubbed Kerr. They know who they are, and don't deserve to be linked for this behavior.

Via The Jawa Report.