P.M.

House Speaker Dennis Hastert was paying an individual from his past to conceal sexual misconduct, two federal law enforcement officials said Friday.

One of the officials, who would not speak publicly about the federal charges in Chicago, said “Individual A,” as the person is described in Thursday’s federal indictment, was male and that the alleged misconduct was unrelated to Hastert’s tenure in Congress.

The actions date to Hastert’s time as a Yorkville, Ill., high school wrestling coach and teacher, the official said.

“It goes back a long way, back to then,” the source 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.”

Asked why Hastert was making the payments, the official said it was to conceal Hastert’s past relationship with the male. “It was sex,'” the source said. The other official, when asked if the misconduct was sexual abuse, said, “That’s correct.”

Hastert and his attorneys could not be reached. Representatives of his lobbying firm declined to comment.

According to the seven-page indictment, Individual A met multiple times in 2010 with Hastert but brought up the allegations of past misconduct during at least one of the meetings. During that discussion and later meetings, Hastert agreed to pay $3.5 million to Individual A to conceal the wrongdoing, the indictment alleged.

From June 2010 to April 2012, Hastert made 15 withdrawals of $50,000 each from bank accounts he controlled and paid Individual A that cash about every six weeks, according to the charges.

After bank representatives questioned Hastert about the withdrawals in 2012, he began illegally structuring the cash withdrawals in increments less than $10,000 to evade bank reporting requirements, the indictment said.

The FBI began investigating the cash withdrawals in 2013. According to the indictment, agents were interested in whether Hastert was using the cash “for a criminal purpose” but were also investigating the possibility that Hastert “was the victim of a criminal extortion related to, among other matters, his prior positions in government.”

When questioned by the FBI about the withdrawals last December, Hastert, who as speaker was once second in line to take over the Oval Office if the president was incapacitated, said he was trying to store cash because he didn’t feel safe with the banking system, according to the charges.

“Yeah … I kept the cash. That’s what I’m doing,” Hastert was quoted as saying to the agents.

A.M.

Whatever the reason or the season, whoever this blackmailer is,  should be “outed.”  Can you image the torment that this person has put Hastert through all of these years?  What could possibly be so bad that is worth $3.5 million?  Did Hastert think the tormentor would eventually stop – blackmailers never stop?  How could Hastert be so naive?

Jaw-dropping Dennis Hastert indictment stirs deeper mystery.

We don’t know — we may never know — what former U.S. House speaker Dennis Hastert did that was so bad, if anything. What we do know: Prosecutors say he was willing to pay $3.5 million to cover it up. The former lawmaker was indicted this week on charges that he lied to the FBI and tried to disguise cash withdrawals paid to an unnamed party identified only as “Individual A” to “compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A.” Hastert’s “prior misconduct” was not explained.

Why Dennis Hastert got indicted by the feds?

On Thursday afternoon, a stunning bit of political news broke: Former House speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) was indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that he lied to the FBI and tried to mask cash transactions made from various banks.

The case is fascinating and a bit complicated, so we thought a walk-through based on the indictment was in order. All of what follows are allegations; Hastert has not been found guilty in a court of law.

Hastert was confronted by someone in 2010 and allegedly agreed to pay money to keep something quiet. According to the indictment, an unnamed longtime acquaintance of Hastert (whom the document refers to as Individual A) brought up “past misconduct” by the former speaker during a conversation in 2010. Over the course of ensuing conversations, Hastert agreed to give Individual A a total of $3.5 million to “compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct.”

The past misconduct isn’t specified, nor is the time frame during which it allegedly occurred.

Hastert allegedly began making $50,000 cash payments to Individual A. Hastert withdrew $1.7 million in cash from various bank accounts through 2014 to give to Individual A. Shortly before he left office, Hastert reported between $3 million and $12 million in assets from real estate holdings; after leaving office, he was a successful lobbyist in Washington.

Hastert’s first problem is that federal law mandates cash transactions exceeding $10,000 be reported using a Currency Transaction Report. The reason for this is pretty obvious: It is meant to allow criminal activity to be traced. It is also illegal to break up large transactions into smaller ones to avoid the reporting requirement. That’s known as “structuring.”

From June 2010 to April 2012, Hastert withdrew $50,000 sums from several banks at which he had accounts and gave the money to Individual A every few weeks. Those transactions weren’t reported.

When a bank asked about the transactions, he allegedly reduced the withdrawal amounts to under $10,000 to avoid reporting rules. After a bank asked about the large sums he was withdrawing, Hastert started pulling out money in smaller increments — in other words, allegedly structuring the payments.

The FBI started investigating Hastert’s transactions. It’s not clear what prompted the investigation, but the implication is that the bureau was given a heads-up by one of Hastert’s banks.

Former House Speaker Hastert indicted on federal charges.

Former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert was indicted on federal charges Thursday, including lying to the FBI in an alleged effort to hide $3.5 million in payments to a person to conceal past misconduct.

Confronted by the FBI, Hastert allegedly lied about the payments. His second legal problem was his response to the FBI inquiry. The FBI was looking for answers to several questions: Was he taking out money in increments of less than $10,000 to avoid reporting requirements? Was he withdrawing the funds as hush money or to cover a crime? Was he being extorted?

Hastert was asked whether he took the money out because he didn’t trust the banking system. His reply? “Yeah … I kept the cash. That’s what I’m doing.” This was not true, according to the FBI’s investigation that uncovered the details above.

The two counts Hastert faces are that he:

1.”did knowingly and willfully make materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements and representations in a matter within the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” and
2.”did knowingly and for the purpose of evading the reporting requirements of Title 31 … structure and assist in structuring transactions … in United States currency in amounts under $10,000 in separate transactions on at least 106 occasions.”

There’s still a lot we don’t know about the case. But as so often happens, it appears to have been the coverup that led to Hastert’s downfall.

While “the indictment did not spell out the exact nature of the ‘prior misconduct’ by Hastert,” The Washington Post reported, “… it noted that before entering state and federal politics in 1981, Has­tert served for more than a decade as a teacher and wrestling coach at Yorkville High School in Illinois.”

The indictment’s allusion to Hastert’s tenure as a wrestling coach and teacher was provocative. So was its reference to Individual A. Individual A claimed to have known Hastert “most of” his or her life. Individual A met with Hastert repeatedly “in or about 2010″ and “discussed past misconduct” by Hastert against him or her that “had occurred years earlier.” And, allegedly, Hastert paid Individual A off.

Indeed, there was far more media interest in what the indictment didn’t say than in what it did. Individual A got as much attention as the relatively mundane details about money allegedly moving in and out of Hastert’s bank accounts. What kind of “misconduct” could the Republican from Illinois been a part of as a coach and teacher?

The U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (I wonder is this  US. Attorney a Democrat), who brought the charges, provided no comment. And Hastert, who has yet to comment, provided no answers.

It was “Denny Hastert’s dark secret,” as the Chicago Tribune said in an editorial. “The formal charges against the affable Illinois Republican are as baffling as they are astonishing. This isn’t just yet another Illinois politician winding up in the crosshairs of federal prosecutors. The underlying narrative leaves much to the imagination.”

The reference sent reporters scurrying to talk with someone familiar with the legislator’s coaching years. The Associated Press turned up David Corwin, whose son wrestled for Hastert at Yorkville. Corwin: “You won’t get anyone to say anything bad about him out here.”

The only accusation against Hastert that got real traction during his years in the House of Representatives concerned his alleged use of earmarks to benefit his property in Illinois, which occurred long after he left coaching. And it’s hard to blackmail someone for activities already publicized.

Blackmail is, after all, a bizarre crime of relatively recent vintage. When blackmailers are successful — unlike, say, bank robbers — no one but their victims know; when blackmailers fail, their intended victims, whose dirty laundry is aired, are humiliated anyway.

“Blackmail, a wonderfully curious offense, is the favorite of clever criminal law theorists,” according to a 2009 academic paper, “Competing Theories of Blackmail: An Empirical Research Critique of Criminal Law Theory.” “It criminalizes the threat to do something that would not be criminal if one did it.” That is, it would be perfectly legal for Individual A to stand up and accuse Hastert of misconduct, but it’s illegal to demand hush money as a condition of keeping quiet.

Blackmail couldn’t really exist until the rise of capitalism and modern social mores. A king was always a king, whether or not he behaved badly, but a businessman or politician who lost his reputation could face ruin — as Josh Duggar is finding out.

“It was a crime that only emerged in the 19th century,” Angus McLaren, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Victoria and the author of “Sexual Blackmail: A Modern History,” told the New York Times in 2009 after David Letterman was blackmailed for his extramarital affairs. “If one was an aristocrat, say, you couldn’t lose your position because of trifling with the housemaids.”

How to respond to a blackmailer is always a conundrum. Pay and cover up — and maybe pay again later — or admit misdeeds and face the music? Letterman’s response was, arguably, masterful: He called the authorities, foiled the $2 million plot, confessed on national television and played the incident for laughs.

Had Letterman had sex with women who worked for him? “My response to that is: ‘Yes, I have,’” the host said to laughter and applause. ” … Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Perhaps it would, perhaps it would — especially for the women.” Cue more laughter and applause.

Letterman added: “But that’s a decision for them to make, if they want to go public … What you don’t want is a guy saying, ‘Well, I know you had sex with women, so I would like $2 million or I’m going to make trouble for you.’”

Depending on what Hastert’s alleged misconduct was, he may not have had the option of ‘fessing up, Letterman-style. An affair between consenting adults? No big deal — society’s changing attitudes toward sex permitted Letterman to bare all. America would not have chuckled had, say, Johnny Carson made a similiar mea culpa in the 1960s. And gay public figures, long considered targets for blackmail, couldn’t simply walk out of the closet in the decades before Stonewall. Many feel they still can’t.

When it comes to sex, blackmail is sometimes a crime with an expiration date. “After a spike during the moralistic years between the world wars, sexual blackmail has lost some of its zing and sting,” the New York Times wrote.

If Hastert committed a crime, however, the zing and sting of publicly revealing what he was blackmailed for may be as painful as federal charges. Whatever his next move is, it will demand legal creativity to keep alleged misconduct from becoming public. If Hastert chooses to go to trial, the government will presumably have to explain who Individual A is. If Hastert negotiates a deal and a plea, the information could still come out in the criminal information document that usually accompanies a plea, or in a sentencing memorandum later.

As Daniel Ellsberg — he of the Pentagon Papers — explained in a 1959 paper on the crime while an economist at Harvard University: “The answer to successful blackmail is not within the scope of logic: it is an art.”

As we all know blackmail is a crime and whoever this person is needs to be “outed.”

kommonsentsjane