On the Trail of 'Stop Sex Predators'

Wondering who the proprietor of the mysteriously connected "Stop Sex Predators" blog, the originator of the Mark Foley story is?

Head over to Ace of Spades, Hot Air and NBer Dan Riehl's blog where the hunt is on. Apparently, the owner of the blog lives in Royal Oak, Michigan, in the congressional district of prominent House Democrat John Conyers. That may not be significant but it does make you wonder how someone who posted at Daily Kos as WHInternNow would be privy to gossip about a congressman's sex life while living in Michigan.

Update 19:41. Does this shoot down a Dem connection or not?

The source who in July gave news media Rep. Mark Foley’s (R-Fla.) suspect e-mails to a former House page says the documents came to him from a House GOP aide.

That aide has been a registered Republican since becoming eligible to vote, said the source, who showed The Hill public records supporting his claim.

The same source, who acted as an intermediary between the aide-turned-whistleblower and several news outlets, says the person who shared the documents is no longer employed in the House.

But the whistleblower was a paid GOP staffer when the documents were first given to the media. [...]

That Foley’s scandalous communications came to public light during Congress’s final week in Washington was largely determined by the media outlets which obtained the suspicious e-mails in the middle of the summer, said the person who provided them to reporters several months ago. [...]

But while the e-mails were concerning enough to prompt this action [Foley being forced to stop corresponding with the page], editors and reporters at various publications did not consider them remarkable enough to write about.

The person who provided the e-mails to several D.C.-based news outlets in July claimed to have no knowledge of who gave them to two Florida papers last year.

D.C.-based media organizations declined to report on the e-mails. But one, ABC News, reported on the e-mails last week after a Weblog, stopsexpredators.blogspot.com, published a few of the exchanges between Foley and the former page. But those blog-reported e-mails did not include correspondence between the page and a House aide in which the teen expressed anxiety about Foley’s intentions.

After ABC News disclosed the e-mails exchanged last year between Foley and a former page, it reported about much more sexually explicit communications between Foley and a different former page over an “instant messaging” (IM) software program in 2003.

The first Web report of the relatively tame e-mails appears to have prompted someone to share the explicit IM messages. After ABC News obtained those messages, in which Foley discussed sexual acts with the second former page, a scandal mushroomed on Capitol Hill, and Foley resigned.

The source who provided the e-mails that ABC News first reported on its blog, denied sharing the more explicit IMs.

So while the primary source of the e-mails which kicked off the scandal was a House GOP aide, the trigger of the news coverage was the weblog.

The creator of stopsexpreditors.blogspot.com is unknown. An interview request e-mailed to the site was not returned.

Confederate Yankee has more on how ABC got its story, apparently from other pages.