PWWA speaks with former congressional page,
Pages taught about prevous scandals in safety effort

Read the Mark Foley e-mails here.

Needs Improvement Proud Of Who We Are has confirmed with a former congressional page that there was widespread knowledge of instant message chats and emails between Rep. Mark Foley and a congressional page. Pages were taught the history of the Congressional Page program, including scandals in the past.

The source, who spoke with Proud of Who We Are on the condition of anonymity, said they had seen “series of instant message conversations that the person in question had saved.” When asked if it was known if Foley had sexual encounters with the pages, the source told Proud Of Who We Are that they believed that was not the case. “I am reasonably sure that it did not go beyond flirtation and some kind of, well, sexual instant message conversations.”

“Some of the things I saw were definitely of a sexual nature,” the source told Proud of Who We Are. “There were references to physical characteristics of the young man in question and whether he was in an aroused state.” The former page also said that they had seen the instant message chats following their time in the Congressional Page program.

“I noticed that Foley paid more attention to the young men among the pages than to any of the girls. He would always initiate conversations with them first, talked with them, joke with them, generally paying a lot of attention.”

Two sources have confirmed that Congressional pages are, as part of the page program, told why the program is structured differently than it was in the past. “The House Clerk officials felt that it would help to protect us if we knew” about the previous scandals, one source said.

One of the sources told Proud of Who We Are that the program is closely supervised but that there “was only so much that they could do.”