The Foley case gets really messy.

The Foley case is getting messier by the day. One former page claimed that they had been warned about Foley. He is now backtracking on his comments. His statement said, "while I may have inadvertently used the word 'warned,' in communication, I can assure youit was not intended. The fact of the matter is in an informal situation a supervisor mentioned that Foley was a bit odd or flaky and did not connotate by tone or otherwise that he should be avoided."

He is also saying that "all the situations with Mr. Foley occurred after we had finished our service as pages." This is important. A page must be 16 years old minimum. They serve one year. If all such contacts with Foley were after that year then they were at least 17 years old. The media is filled with stories about a 16 year old.

Now I learn that ABC News which broke the story has been posting e-mails, which I have linked to, but that we are getting e-mails from different former pages mixed in together. What looks like one long raunchy conversation with one page may be snippets taken from conversations with more than one ex-page. The pages would have kept these emails and they would be the ones who are now exposing the story.

The problem here is that we have an anonymous accusation. Perhaps we have several of them. In court one reason that the accused is supposed to have the right to face his accuser is avoid these sorts of problems. In the media we have anonymous emails presented and strung together. Context is missing and we know nothing about the individuals making the accusations. It appears with several people involved in this campaign to get Foley that we could have various motives as well.

One accuser is no longer anonymous. He works for a political campaign in Oklahoma and the candidate he works for as mentioned him publicly. Some of the more raunchy conversations were actually with him and not with the page who was allegedly 16 at the time. This former page has an attorney who claims he will cooperate with the investigation and that his client was a minor at the time. Does this attorney not know the age of consent in DC and that his client was above age in that jurisdiction? He was not a minor in regards to sex when he had his conversation with Foley.

Anonymous accusations were at the core of this scandal. ABC News blocked out the screen name of the page in the correspondence. They presented selected excerpts denying us context. They ran texts from at least two different people and it appears that much of the reporting has confused these two as the same person.

I am starting to wonder if this thing may not unravel. I just suspect it won't be until after the election. Has ABC done a job on Foley?