How Did Denny Hastert Get Rich Enough to Pay Millions to an Accuser?

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National Review:

enny Hastert — the former House speaker now indicted for violating regulations on bank withdrawals that were originally meant to snare drug dealers — was a man of integrity according to his former House colleagues.

 

By the sketchy standards of Illinois politics, that might well have been true. But his fall from grace should prompt other questions about how a former high-school teacher who held elective office from 1981 to 2007 could leave Congress with a fortune estimated at $4 million to $17 million. When he entered Congress in 1987, he was worth at most $275,000. Hastert was the beneficiary of very lucky land deals while in Congress; and since leaving office, he has earned more than $2 million a year as a lobbyist. That helps explain how he could agree to pay $3.5 million to a former student to cover up an ancient sex-abuse scandal.

I saw him become passionate only once, when he defended earmarks.

Denny Hastert used to visit the Wall Street Journal, where I worked while he was the speaker. He was a bland, utterly conventional supporter of the status quo; his idea of reform was to squelch anyone who disturbed Congress’s usual way of doing business. I saw him become passionate only once, when he defended earmarks — the special projects such as Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” that members dropped at the last minute into conference reports, deliberately leaving no time to debate or amend them. Earmarks reached the staggering level of 15,000 in 2005, and their stench helped cost the GOP control of Congress the next year.

 

But Hastert was unbowed. “Who knows best where to put a bridge or a highway or a red light in his district?” I recall him bellowing. I responded that the Illinois Department of Transportation came to mind, and we then agreed to disagree.

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THERE’S SOMETHING FOR EVERYBODY IN DENNY HASTERT’S INDICTMENT

 

Last week in a rather surprising development, the Justice Department handed down an eight-page indictment of the former Speaker of the House, Denny Hastert of Illinois.

Hastert, it appears, didn’t just build a political narrative out of his time as a high-school wrestling coach. From the indictment and reporting subsequent to it, Hastert may have sexually abused one or more students in his care. The indictment concerns a pattern of bank withdrawals the former congressman and current $2 million-a-year earner as a DC lobbyist made in order to pay off someone in either compensation or blackmail for “prior bad acts.” Hastert was making frequent withdrawals just below the $10,000 mark upon which federal reporting requirements rest, and that alerted his bankers and the FBI. Questioned about the withdrawals, Hastert said they were because he didn’t trust the banking system.

The indictment says Hastert was trying to pay his counterparty in either a blackmail or compensation arrangement some $3.5 million, and had satisfied some half of that figure before the hammer fell.

 

http://spectator.org/articles/62917/there%E2%80%99s-something-everybody-denny-hastert%E2%80%99s-indictment

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The Hastert ‘Structuring’ Case and Over-Criminalization

 

The indictment of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert provides a good opportunity to weigh in on a subject that is especially apt for a blog called “Ordered Liberty”: over-criminalization. It is one that has gotten a good deal of attention on the right and the left — even bringing Rand Paul and Al Sharpton together, notwithstanding their disagreements on most everything else.

The ever-more sweeping regulation of human activity and concomitant diminution of liberty are elements of the “democratic despotism” problem foreseen by Alexis de Tocqueville, as Roger Kimball eloquently observes (see, e.g., here).

 

Students of the criminal law learn early on the difference between malum in se and malum prohibitum — i.e., conduct that is wrong in and of itself (e.g., murder, theft) versus conduct that is considered wrong only because we have chosen to legislate against it. The structuring of cash transactions is an excellent example of the latter.

 

There is nothing inherently wrong with dealing in cash or, to get to the specifics of Hastert’s case, withdrawing one’s own money from a financial institution in order to spend it as one chooses. Even if one desires to engage in conduct that is condemnable (whether or not criminal), the act of withdrawing money for purposes of carrying out the condemnable act is not itself inherently wrong.

 

http://pjmedia.com/andrewmccarthy/2015/06/01/the-hastert-structuring-case-and-over-criminalization/

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Why Denny Hastert’s indictment is a danger to us all

 

I was never a huge Hastert fan when he was Speaker of the House. I was never quite sure what, if anything, he believed in. Having said that, he did a couple of good things. He instituted the “Hastert Rule,” which says no bill comes to the floor of the House unless a majority of the GOP caucus is in favor of it. When the GOP was blown out in 2006, Hastert resigned. Now he is under indictment. He seems to have committed two crimes. First, he withdrew his own money from the bank in a way the Feds disapprove of to pay a blackmailer. Second, he wasn’t forthcoming when the FBI questioned him.

 

To be clear, I don’t really care what Hastert did to be blackmailed. As society has embraced homosexual marriage and a mutilated and mildly deranged Bruce Jenner we have moved past the point where we should be outraged about a teacher diddling a student. It is really a mark of Hastert losing touch with the zeitgeist that he agreed to pay blackmail rather than pitching the story as a reality show.

http://www.redstate.com/2015/06/02/denny-hasterts-indictment-danger-us/

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Hastert's self-enrichment indicts Washington establishment

 

The crime with which federal prosecutors have charged former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., is an obscure, dubious federal banking law that could just as easily be used to go after innocent people.

That is not to say Hastert is innocent. If the the stories that have leaked in the media are true, the true sin Hastert committed is unspeakable, but possibly unprosecutable.

There is one aspect of the Hastert scandal, however, that reflects a problem that is more troubling than "structuring" bank withdrawals, but more easily repaired than whatever Hastert might have done many decades ago. That problem boils down to one question: How in the world could a school-teacher-turned lawmaker afford to pay, reportedly, $3.5 million in hush money?

 

Hastert had been a high school teacher, a wrestling coach and a state legislator when he was elected to Congress in 1986. Over the next three decades, he became very rich by wielding his power — both while in office and after leaving office. In other words, Hastert monetized his public service into a lucrative lobbying career — largely by increasing government.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hasterts-self-enrichment-indicts-washington-establishment/article/2565484

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Alleged Hastert abuse victim identified

 

An alleged victim of sexual abuse from former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has been identified in a interview released early Friday morning.

 

Before he died, Steve Reinboldt purportedly told his sister, Jolene Burdge, that he was abused by Hastert throughout his four years of high school, she said in an interview with ABC News.

 

“I asked him, when was your first same sex experience. He looked at me and said, ‘It was with Dennis Hastert,’” Burdge told ABC News. “I was stunned."

Her brother was a student manager on the Yorkville High School wrestling team while Hastert was a coach, and the pair reportedly also traveled together as part of an Explorers troop.

Burdge said she learned of the abuse in 1979, eight years after her brother graduated from high school. He died of AIDS in 1995, and Hastert attended his funeral, according to ABC News.

 

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/244110-alleged-hastert-abuse-victim-identified