ABC News has a taste of Trandahl’s testimony:
The former clerk of the House of Representatives, Jeff Trandahl, who testified for more than four hours before the House Ethics Committee today, is believed to have testified that a top aide to House Speaker Dennis Hastert was informed of “all issues dealing with the page program,” according to a Republican familiar with the investigation.The Republican source said Trandahl planned to name Ted Van Der Meid, the speaker’s counsel and floor manager, as the person who was briefed on a regular basis about any issue that arose in the page program, including a “problem group of members and staff who spent too much time socializing with pages outside of official duties.” One of whom was Mark Foley.
Van Der Meid, you might remember, was one of the Hastert staffers who was involved in the fall, 2005 response to the “overly friendly” emails that Foley had sent to a staffer. Hastert had described Van Der Meid as “the Speaker’s Office liaison with the Clerk’s Office.”
That brings to two the number of staffers in Hastert’s office who allegedly knew about Foley’s pursuit of House pages before last fall. According to Kirk Fordham, Foley’s former chief of staff, Trandahl also alerted Hastert’s chief of staff Scott Palmer about Foley’s behavior.
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