Dennis Hastert, ex-Speaker of the House, indicted in Chicago

"andyt" said
3.5 million. That's some cover up.

Indicted former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was paying a former student from Yorkville, Ill., to conceal his alleged sexual abuse of the youth that took place while Hastert was a teacher and wrestling coach at a high school there, federal law enforcement officials said Friday.

A top official, who would not be identified speaking about the federal charges in Chicago, said investigators also spoke with a second person who raised similar allegations that corroborated what the student said.

The second person was not being paid by Hastert, the official said.

Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert indicted
Federal prosecutors have announced bank-related charges against former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert.
The disclosures followed Thursday’s federal indictment against Hastert on suspicion of lying to the FBI about the reasons he made large cash withdrawals, which were allegedly used to buy the man’s silence.

A top federal law enforcement official, who would not be identified speaking about the federal charges, said “Individual A” -- as the unnamed acquittance is described in the indictment -- was a male whom Hastert knew prior to his tenure in Congress.

“It goes back a long way, back to then,” the official said. “It has nothing to do with public corruption or a corruption scandal. Or to his time in office.” Thursday’s indictment described the misconduct “against Individual A” as having “occurred years earlier,” noting that Hastert had known the person “most of Individual A’s life.”

When asked about the nature of Hastert’s alleged misconduct, the law enforcement official said, “It was sex.’’

"BartSimpson" said


Instead he lied to the FBI and that's really the core issue here. The FBI takes it personally when people lie to them.

On an aside, I am utterly opposed to the law that requires people to report to the government what they do with their lawfully earned money. It's none of the government's f*cking business and I hope this idiot law gets overturned one of these days.

Why Is It a Crime to Evade Government Scrutiny?

Prosecutors may suspect Dennis Hastert of serious misconduct, but charging him with trying to avoid surveillance risks criminalizing harmless behavior.

Conor Friedersdorf 12:14 PM ET

Dennis Hastert is a hard man to defend. The former House Speaker got filthy rich as a Washington, D.C. lobbyist by trading on the contacts and knowledge that he gained while in office. His time in Congressional leadership coincided with that body’s abject failure to exercise oversight or protect civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks. And now he stands accused of a serious personal transgression: improper sexual contact with a boy he knew years ago while teaching high school and trying to hide that sordid history by paying the young man to keep quiet.

If federal prosecutors could meet the legal thresholds for charging and convicting Hastert of a sex crime, they would be fully justified in aggressively pursuing the matter.

Instead they’ve done something alarming. The Hastert indictment doesn’t charge him for, or even accuse him of, sexual misconduct. Rather, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him.”

It isn’t illegal to withdraw money from the bank, nor to compensate someone in recognition of past harms, nor to be the victim of a blackmail scheme. So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government? The alarming aspect of this case is the fact that an American is ultimately being prosecuted for the crime of evading federal government surveillance.

That has implications for all of us.

By way of background, financial institutions are required to report all transactions of $10,000 or more to the federal government. This is meant to make it harder to commit racketeering, tax fraud, drug crimes, and other serious offenses. Hastert began paying off the person he allegedly wronged years before by withdrawing large amounts of cash. But once he realized that this was generating activity reports, he allegedly started making more withdrawals, each one less than $10,000, to avoid drawing attention to the fact that he was paying someone for his silence.

Again, the payments weren’t illegal. But as it turns out, structuring financial transactions “to evade currency transaction reporting requirements” is a violation of federal law.

To see why that is unjust, it helps to set aside Hastert’s case and consider a more sympathetic figure. Imagine that a documentary filmmaker like Laura Poitras, whose films are critical of government surveillance, is doing her taxes next year. And she discovers that, having earned more freelance income than she anticipated in 2015, she must write the IRS a check for $9,000. Say that at the beginning of a typical month, she moves $3,000 from her savings to her checking account to cover basic expenses. But next April, anticipating her tax payment, she needs to move $12,000 between accounts. Vaguely knowing that a report to the federal government is generated for transactions of $10,000 or more, she thinks to herself, “What with my films criticizing NSA surveillance, I don’t want to invite any extra scrutiny—out of an abundance of caution, or maybe even paranoia, I’m gonna transfer $9,000 today and $3,000 tomorrow. The last thing I need is to give someone a pretext to hassle me over anything.”

That would be illegal, even though in this hypothetical she has committed no crime and is motivated, like many people, by a simple aversion to being monitored.

I don’t much like the $10,000 reporting requirement: as I see it, behavior that lots of people engage in every day for perfectly legal reasons shouldn’t trigger surveillance. And it is certainly perverse to set a threshold for government scrutiny, only to make it a criminal offense to purposely avoid triggering that threshold.

Think of applying the same logic in another context.

What if the government installed surveillance cameras on various streets in a municipality and then made it a crime to walk along a route that skirted those cameras?

Of course, Hastert may also have committed more serious offenses. The current charges could be motivated by a desire to prosecute him for sex crimes. But that dodges the issue.

“In order to punish him for that crime, the government should charge him with it, then prosecute him with due process and convict him in front of a jury of his peers,” Greenwald argues. “What over-criminalization does is allow the government to turn anyone it wants into a felon, and thus punish them without having to overcome those vital burdens. Regardless of one’s views of Hastert or his alleged misconduct here, it should take little effort to see why nobody should want that.”

If the state can decide that specific, legal behavior will trigger scrutiny by federal law enforcement and that any attempt to avoid that scrutiny is illegal, even if no other crime is proved, everyone’s privacy and freedom from unjust arrest is undermined.


Conor Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice, California, and is the founding editor of The Best of Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

"BeaverFever" said
It honestly seems like every single person elected to office in the US over the past 50 years or so is a thief and/or sexual predator.

If the state can decide that specific, legal behavior will trigger scrutiny by federal law enforcement and that any attempt to avoid that scrutiny is illegal, even if no other crime is proved...