Whatever “misconduct” blackmailed ex House Speaker Dennis Hastert was hoping to conceal by making illicit and hefty withdrawals and then lying to federal agents about those cash payments, it just blew up in his face.
This week’s indictment of the previously “clean as a whistle” republican henchman on banking fraud and related charges has his fellow GOP members and congressional colleagues shocked, and wondering what else he could possibly be hiding.
Unfortunately, the indictment of Dennis Hastert doesn’t detail the exact “prior misconduct” he was discreetly paying an unnamed blackmailer never to disclose. But those court papers do specifically cite the ex Speaker’s earlier career as an Illinois schoolteacher and coach from 1965 to 1981, further raising speculation and eyebrows.
Hastert, 73, is accused of carefully transferring over a million-dollars in what he’d hoped would be untraceable hush money to an unidentified person in order to “compensate for and conceal” unknown offenses.
American banks are required to automatically report all customer transactions of $10,000 or more, and prosecutors claim that the former congressman deceptively "structured" his own to purposely evade the law.
Disgraced for it now, and no doubt bracing for additional damaging disclosures, Dennis Hastert was once better known for being the longest-serving Republican House Speaker in history, as well as a diehard Bush supporter.
