I’ve seen these lines pop up here and there recently:
The seriousness of the charge mandates that we investigate this.
Or…
Even though there is no evidence, the seriousness of the charge is what matters–Thomas Foley (D, WA)
The sentiment there has been repeated, in spirit if not in exact quote, many times over the last few decades. Witness, for example, the sexual assault witch hunt against USSC nominee Kavanaugh, the insistence upon investigating Trump as a Russian assert. Both were claims asserted without evidence, both were taken seriously enough to consume months to years of effort by many, many journalists and investigators and politicians.
Now it is being turned around to justify everything up to an including negating the recent election, overturning the results and calling for a new one. Granted, that just ain’t gonna happen. But once you accept the notion that simply *claiming* that A Very Bad Thing Happened mandates a full investigation and an assumption of guilt prior to an actual establishment of guilt, you can’t really argue that the claim that the election was fraudulent or tainted or stolen isn’t worth worrying about.
Thing is: I can’t quite seem to find a primary source on that quote from Rep. Foley. Closest I could find was this LA Times article from 1991:
“We have no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing, but the seriousness of the allegations and the weight of circumstantial information compel an effort to establish the facts,” said House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.) and Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Me.) in a joint statement.
This was in reference to the conspiracy theory that Reagan & Bush delayed the Iranians turning over the hostages in order to win the 1980 election. This same line of thinking asserted without evidence that Bush hopped on board an SR-71 and used it as a private SST to get to Paris to negotiate with Iranians without being missed back home.
So are the Foley “quotes” at the beginning of this post accurate, or are they paraphrases of the “joint statement?”