Thursday, May 28, 2015

Reading Between The Lines on Hastert Indictment

May 28, 2015 Washingon Post reports on indictment of former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert:
J. Dennis Hastert, the longest serving Republican speaker in the U.S. House, was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges that he violated banking laws in a bid to pay $3.5 million because of “past misconduct” against an unnamed individual from their hometown west of Chicago.

Hastert, 73, who has been a high-paid lobbyist in Washington since his 2007 retirement, schemed to mask more than $950,000 in withdrawals from various accounts that violated federal banking laws that require disclosure of large cash transactions, according to a seven-page indictment delivered by a grand jury in Chicago.

The indictment did not spell out the exact nature of the “prior misconduct” by Hastert against the individual from his hometown, Yorkville, but noted that before entering politics in 1981, Hastert spent more than a decade as a teacher and wrestling coach at the local high school. The unnamed individual has known Hastert for most of that person’s life, the indictment states.
 What in the world could he have done that was worth $3.5 million to cover up?  Hastert was a teacher and wrestling coach.  Did he ever coach at Penn State?  I have pointed out in the past that there is a lot of evidence that homosexuals were disproportionately sexually abused as children and I do not doubt that many of the abusers were pretending to be respectable sorts.

The /New York Times mentions:
In 2006, he faced criticism that he and top aides failed to respond to warnings about the behavior of Representative Mark Foley of Florida, whose sexually explicit electronic messages to former Congressional pages sparked a scandal that contributed to the Republicans’ losing their House majority. Mr. Hastert chose not to seek re-election in 2008.
 Gee, I wonder why?  Afraid to come out of the closet?

Sure enough.  From May 29, 2015 Los Angeles Times:
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

3 comments:

  1. Could you explain what a "proportionate" amount of sexual abuse would be? Is it a little less than Josh Duggar handed out to his sisters?

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  2. Proportionate relative to their fraction of the society. Gay people are about 2x as likely to be sexually abused as straight people.

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  3. I think you've hit on something. Your supposition is bolstered by the fact that sexual misconduct by Republicans is not tolerated whereas Democrats are given a free ride. At the same time Foley was being accused of sending salacious emails to a teenage congressional pages, top Democrats including John Kerry (who, by the way, served in Vietnam), Ted Kennedy, and Nancy Pelosi went to the funeral of ex Congressman Gerry Studds. Studds was not accused of emailing or even passing salacious notes to teenage congressional pages. He was found to have had an ongoing affair with a teenage male congressional page. Studds was not a liability to Democrats like Foley was to Republicans. He was a hero for being a gay congressman. His having sex with an underage page was ignored.

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