Maddy Sauer/ABC interview on Foley email trail

int.excerpt:
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/04/1428217

AMY GOODMAN: Maddy Sauer joins us in the studio now, producer with the investigative unit, ABC News, has produced the stories on the Foley scandal with correspondent Brian Ross. Jonathan Kaplan joins us in Washington, D.C., a staff writer with The Hill newspaper, has also been following the Foley story. Maddy Sauer, let's begin with you. First of all, welcome to Democracy Now!

MADDY SAUER: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Tell us exactly how this went down. Tell us how you developed this story.

MADDY SAUER: Well, it started on Thursday, when we ran a story on our website after we had obtained some emails that were written to a 16-year-old former congressional page from Congressman Foley that the page had forwarded on to a congressional staffer, saying that they made him uncomfortable. And these were certainly not the sexually explicit emails we later obtained, but they were strange things that you wouldn’t think that a congressman would be writing to a junior in high school: “What do you want for your birthday? What kind of stuff do you like to do? I like to work out. I like to keep in shape.” And it was enough that the young boy had gotten a little freaked out by it and forwarded it along to a staffer. And those were the emails we had initially obtained, and we did a story on that on Thursday.

AMY GOODMAN: And how did you get this information?

MADDY SAUER: They were passed to a colleague of mine from a source, not someone from a Democratic campaign, a source on the Hill. And when we talked to Foley's office about those emails, they seemed to know all about them. “It’s no big deal. He is overly friendly. He’s overly engaging. If he’s guilty of anything, that’s all he’s guilty of. He’s very close with the pages. He has worked with the page program for some time.”

So we published that story, and then almost immediately we began receiving emails from former pages