From AmericaBLOG:

Note to the Hastert advance team: Maybe the graveyard background wasn’t the best idea… I’m just sayin’…

From AmericaBLOG:

AP: Former chief of staff to Tom Reynolds and Mark Foley says he warned Hastert’s office two years ago about Foley…

A senior congressional aide said Wednesday that he alerted House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s office two years ago about worrisome conduct by former Rep. Mark Foley with teenage pages.

Kirk Fordham told The Associated Press that when he was told about Foley’s inappropriate behavior toward pages, he had “more than one conversation with senior staff at the highest level of the House of Representatives asking them to intervene.”

The conversations took place long before the e-mail scandal broke, Fordham said, and at least a year earlier than members of the House GOP leadership have acknowledged.

Leave your predictions in the comment box. I say Hastert has 24 hours left.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) is in big trouble. He’s desperately back pedaling, trying to find excuses, but at the end of the day, Hastert cares more about politics than he does this great nation.

Hastert is part of a major Congressional cover up - an organized campaign to protect a known pedophile in the GOP ranks.

A message to Dennis Hastert: resign your post, Mr. Speaker. You are the leader of a party that has lost touch with American values and you must go.

Even the uber-conservative Washington Times agrees.

Time to go, Denny. Sorry, but you brought it on yourself.

The Washington Post has some more details this morning about what Republican leaders knew in the months prior to Rep. Mark Foley’s resignation over illicit conversations he had online with a Congressional Page.

Whoops.

From the Wapo:

Hastert’s aides learned in the fall of 2005 only of e-mail exchanges that House officials eventually deemed “over-friendly” with the Louisiana teenager, the speaker’s office said yesterday in a lengthy statement. “While the Speaker does not explicitly recall this conversation” with Reynolds, the statement said, “he has no reason to dispute Congressman Reynolds’s recollection that he reported to him on the problem and its resolution.”

Boehner and Reynolds said their offices learned of the Foley e-mails months ago from Rep. Rodney Alexander (R), who sponsored the page from his northeastern-Louisiana district.

ABC News is now reporting that Speaker of the House, and DeLay pool boy, Dennis Hastert (R-IL) is now “in the mix” in the ever widening Jack Abramoff scandal. Hastert is of course denying the claims, and even the Justice Department has denied the story, but Brian Ross and ABC continue to insist that multiple sources have told them that Hastert is under the microscope too. ThinkProgress has the transcript.

ROSS: Good morning Robin. Despite flat and repeated denies from the Department of Justice, federal law enforcement officials insist to ABC news the FBI investigation of capitol hill corruption has widened to include potentially Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert. Officials describe the 64-year-old Illinois republican as “very much in the mix” of the corruption investigation. Something the speaker told ABC News he was unaware of.

HASTERT: I know nothing about it.

ROSS: Part of the investigation is said to involve a letter Hastert wrote three years ago urging the Secretary of Interior to block a casino on an Indian reservation that would have competed with other tribes. The other tribes were represented by convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, who reportedly has provided details of his dealings with Hastert as part of his plea agreement with the government. The letter was written shortly after a fund-raiser for Hastert at a restaurant owned by Abramoff. Abramoff and his clients contributed more than $26,000 at the time.

Knowing this now it seems particularly suspicious that Hastert was so quick to denounce the raid on Rep. William Jefferson’s office earlier in the week.

From Political Wire:

After holding a press conference at a local gas station in Washington, D.C., House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) was photographed several blocks away getting out of the hybrid automobile he used at the event and getting back into his gasoline-powered SUV.