GOP Staffer Turns Into Whistleblower, Threatening Those He Loyally Served

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The New York Sun

WASHINGTON — For 20 years, Kirk Fordham was a loyal staffer and strategist — rising from his early days as a Capitol Hill intern to the coveted post of chief of staff to a senior American congressman.

But on Wednesday, amid a scandal that has rattled Capitol Hill and ended the political career of Mr. Fordham’s longtime boss, Rep. Mark Foley, a Republican of Florida, the 39-year-old aide emerged as a central player in a saga that could bring down the same House GOP leadership that he worked so tirelessly to serve.

No longer a behind-the-scenes operator, Mr. Fordham resigned his post as chief of staff to Rep.Thomas Reynolds, a Republican of New York, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, and declared his intention to tell all when the FBI calls.

“I have no reason to state anything other than the facts,” Mr. Fordham wrote in an e-mail sent to the Los Angeles Times from his personal account.”I have no congressman and no office to protect.”

Mr. Fordham’s assertion Wednesday that he informed House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s top aide more than two years ago of Mr. Foley’s “inappropriate” behavior with teenage House pages directly contradicted claims from the Illinois Republican and other leaders that they did not know the full scope of Mr. Foley’s problems until news reports appeared last week of his lurid instant message exchanges with boys as long as three years ago.

Mr. Hastert’s chief of staff, Scott Palmer, denied Mr. Fordham’s account in a terse, one-sentence statement. But Mr. Fordham’s decision to speak publicly, coming one day after President Bush offered a stout defense of Mr. Hastert amid calls for the speaker’s resignation, handed more fodder to Democrats and other critics who are accusing the GOP of a cover-up. And it put Mr. Fordham in the center of a burgeoning scandal at the height of a heated election campaign that was already shaping up as a possible defeat for the GOP majority.

For the soft-spoken Mr. Fordham, a role as a possible whistle-blower is an unfamiliar one — but it is perhaps not surprising for a longtime Republican weary of his party’s anti-gay political tactics and concerned that some were planning to make him take the fall. He spoke out Wednesday to denounce what he said were “false” charges from unnamed sources that he had tried to suppress details to protect his old boss.

A native of suburban Rochester, N.Y., he has worked for Republicans ever since his college days as an intern for his congressman, one-term Republican Fred Eckert, and as a volunteer stuffing envelopes and knocking on doors for a candidate for county executive. Back then, he was a true-believing conservative.

“He did it all. He did it enthusiastically,” the chairman of the New York State Republican Committee, Stephen Minarik, said. In 1994, Mr. Fordham left the Hill to manage the congressional campaign of Mr. Foley, who at the time was a fast-rising but little-known Florida state senator.

The two shared something in common: Both were gay men trying to make their mark in a Republican Party that was anything but hospitable to gays.

Mr. Foley won the race, despite an opponent who raised his sexual orientation as an issue. Mr. Fordham became his chief of staff and stayed with him for 10 years — advising the congressman on p.r. strategies and helping him become one of the GOP’s most prolific fund-raisers.

According to records compiled by the Center for Public Integrity, Mr. Fordham sometimes traveled with Mr. Foley on trips funded by GOP interest groups, including visits to Scotland, Cape Cod, and Chicago. Mr. Fordham’s lawyer, Tim Heaphy, said Wednesday that the trips were solely business-related and the two were never romantically involved.

When Senator Graham, a Democrat of Florida, announced in February 2003 that he would seek his party’s presidential nomination — thus making it unlikely that he would run for re-election — Mr. Foley, armed with a fat campaign account, decided to run for his seat. Mr. Fordham was his most important adviser.

As Mr. Foley began campaigning across the state, a South Florida weekly newspaper, New Times, called on him to come out of the closet. It was Mr. Fordham who tried to persuade mainstream state political reporters to steer clear of the story, even as the White House moved aggressively to find a different candidate. When the Foley campaign accused Democratic activists of spreading the story, it was Mr. Fordham who singled out the “liberal gay press” for leading the charge, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. It was around that time that, based on Mr. Fordham’s disclosures this week, his loyalty was tested. Mr. Fordham now says that he noticed “inappropriate behavior” by his boss related to the House page program and reported it to Mr. Hastert’s office.

Mr. Foley dropped his Senate bid, citing his father’s illness as the reason. In early 2004, Mr. Fordham moved to Orlando, Fla., to work as finance director for the Senate candidate that the White House had recruited in Mr. Foley’s stead: the former secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Mel Martinez.

Mr. Martinez was considered a moderate, and working for him seemed a natural fit for Mr. Fordham. But that early comfortable feeling likely dissipated when a Martinez campaign literature accused a challenger in the Republican primary of supporting the “radical homosexual lobby” by backing hate-crimes legislation that included protections based on sexual orientation.

Still, Mr. Fordham continued working for Mr. Martinez, who went on to win, and then moved back to Washington to work for a prominent GOP consulting firm before joining Mr. Reynolds’s staff.

In the end, it was Mr. Fordham’s loyalty to Mr. Foley that embroiled him in the scandal — leading him to counsel his former boss and longtime friend as the news of Mr. Foley’s e-mails and instant messages began to surface, and even to ask ABC News to withhold the most lurid messages.

In exchange for limiting details of the instant messages, Mr. Fordham supposedly offered ABC’s Brian Ross exclusive news of Mr. Foley’s resignation. Democrats in upstate New York subsequently complained that Mr. Fordham was trying to limit the scandal involving his old boss and its impact on his new one, Mr. Reynolds, who is in charge of the GOP’s House campaign strategy and is locked in a tight re-election battle.


The New York Sun

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