YORKVILLE, Ill. — The indictment of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert was triggered by his alleged effort to hide payments of hush money to a male student he allegedly sexually molested decades ago, a federal law enforcement official said Friday.
The indictment asserts that the acts Hastert wanted to conceal date to when he was a teacher and coach in Illinois, before entering politics in the early 1980s, the official said. Authorities said the victim, who has spoken with law enforcement officials, was one of Hastert’s students.
Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker in House history, is not expected to face molestation charges because authorities don’t think they have enough evidence to bring a case against him, the official said.
A federal grand jury in Chicago on Thursday indicted the former speaker, 73, on charges that he violated banking laws in a bid to pay $3.5 million to an unnamed person to cover up “past misconduct.” The male victim is that person, the official said.
“Shocked”
The case has riveted and shocked Washington, where Hastert has been a high-paid lobbyist since his 2007 retirement from Congress.
“The Denny I served with worked hard on behalf of his constituents and the country. I’m shocked and saddened to learn of these reports,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said in a statement released Friday.
Law enforcement officials said they, at first, didn’t know what to make of a series of large cash withdrawals Hastert began making in 2010.
It was only after FBI agents interviewed Hastert in December, officials said, that investigators began piecing together the details. In that interview, the indictment said, Hastert lied to the agents, telling them he made the withdrawals because he didn’t feel safe keeping his money in the banking system.
Actually, court documents said, Hastert was scheming to mask more than $950,000 in withdrawals from various accounts, in violation of federal banking laws that require the disclosure of large cash transactions.
Hastert is silent
Hastert has not spoken publicly about the case, and efforts to reach him have been unsuccessful. No lawyer or representative has spoken on Hastert’s behalf.
If convicted of seeking to evade banking laws and lying to the FBI, the former House speaker could face up to 10 years in prison, prosecutors said.
From Washington to Yorkville, former Hastert associates were left stunned at the turn of events. They said they did not know where their former boss was holed up.
“Anyone who knows Denny is shocked and confused” by the indictment, Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., said Friday. He said Hastert should have “his day in court to address these very serious accusations,” and called the case “a very troubling development.”
Don Davidson, who taught history with Hastert at Yorkville Community High School between 1970 and 1977, said he was “astounded.”
“He was a good teacher, and he treated the students fairly,” Davidson said.
In a statement Friday, the Yorkville school district that employed Hastert from 1965 to 1981 said it first learned about the charges when Hastert was indicted.
Restraint from Dems
Democrats mostly resisted criticizing Hastert. Former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour warned Democrats to not make the controversy a political cudgel.
“It doesn’t matter a bit politically,” Barbour said in a telephone interview from Mississippi, where he previously served as governor. “Democrats hope it does, but I don’t think so.”
The indictment did not spell out the nature of what it described as “prior misconduct” by Hastert. The person who Hastert agreed to pay had known Hastert most of his life, growing up in Yorkville, the city next to Hastert’s home town of Plano, in the exurbs west of Chicago, the indictment said. Prosecutors said the actions “occurred years earlier” than the 2010 meeting that sparked the payments.
In 2010, confronted about the “prior misconduct,” the former speaker agreed to pay $3.5 million to the person “to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A,” prosecutors alleged.
Over five years, Hastert withdrew about $1.7 million in cash from his various bank accounts — at one point in 2014 delivering $100,000 a month to the person in question, the indictment alleged.
