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October 12, 2006

The Palace Guard

The House Ethics Committee seems to be zeroing in on Hastert's staff, specifically his Chief of Staff, Deputy Chief of Staff, and his Counsel.

The three -- chief of staff Scott Palmer, deputy chief of staff Mike Stokke and counsel Ted Van Der Meid -- have formed a palace guard around Hastert (R-Ill.) for years, attaining great degrees of power and unusual autonomy to deal with matters of politics, policy and House operations. They are also remarkably close. Palmer and Stokke have been with Hastert for decades. They live together in a Capitol Hill townhouse and commute back to Illinois on weekends.

Outside of the salatious innuendo that the Post seems to be putting in at the end of that paragraph -- DC housing is expensive, especially when you live here part time, and it is not at all uncommon for staffmembers of the same or different Members to be roommates -- it is beginning to look as though Hastert gave too much power to staffmembers, and they may have "protected" him from information he should have had.

Within Hastert's operation, some staff members appear to point accusingly at Van Der Meid, who is in charge of ethics matters and is widely believed to have steered Hastert wrong before.

Van Der Meid, a former chief Republican counsel for the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, helped engineer the failed effort to change GOP ethics rules to allow an indicted lawmaker to remain in the leadership. The power play was designed to keep then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) at his post, but it backfired spectacularly, embarrassing many Republicans and leaving a blemish on Hastert's record.

One House leadership aide said Van Der Meid lacks the personal connections with the speaker that Palmer and Stokke have, making him the most vulnerable of the three.

The staff issue will be front and center today, as the ethics committee takes the testimony of Kirk Fordham, Foley's former chief of staff, who is to testify that in 2003 he alerted Palmer to Foley's behavior. A source with knowledge of the events said Fordham will detail repeated efforts by then-House Clerk Jeff Trandahl to raise alarms about Foley's interest in young pages, and Fordham's own confrontations with Foley.

Regardless of whether its true or not, and my guess is that it probably is true that the staff tried to handle it at the staff level, it looks like Van Der Meid is the one that is being set up as the fall guy.

Posted by Alan at October 12, 2006 05:29 AM