You mean, paying one of his victims to not go to the police about the violent crimes he committed against minors?
I hope you are never desperate enough to pay the rent (or your kid’s medical bills, or your own) to have to make a bargain with the devil.
You’d think that by now the right would have found out that it never works.
So we know it was violent and was with a minor? It wasn’t consensual? We have evidence of that?
Cenk Uygur had a good point on the ‘how they caught him’ angle of him being accused of trying to circumvent the law by making payments low enough that they wouldn’t be tracked being like saying you are trying to circumvent red light laws by only going on the green.
If it’s with a minor, it can’t be consensual (unless the other is also a minor). The power imbalance doesn’t work that way. Particularly not with a g-d-damned teacher, for f–k’s sake.
Forcing sexual activity on someone who is unable to give consent is a violent act, yes.
A coach is in a position of authority over a student; thus, even if the student is legally old enough to consent to sex with a peer, by definition they cannot freely consent in this case.
The evidence is that he was a coach and the person in question was a student at the time.
We don’t know that ‘Individual A’ was a minor at the time. We don’t know if there was sex.
All we know is that he was making payments to Individual A. Read Count 1 again and try to separate speculation from known fact. It’s just as possible that Individual A was a consenting male and Hastert is trying to cover up legal homosexual behavior. That happens quite a lot actually. Maybe it was rape of an underage person. My point is we do not know at this time.
And check out Count 2. Count 2 is saying he broke the law by following the law.
You’re right, I am assuming that since the student was a student at the school where Hastert was a coach that it can be construed as non-consensual due to the power-imbalance. And the individual might be a minor, might not; but still technically non-consensual.
Let us run through this in chronological order.
(1) Forty (?) years ago, Hastert supposedly molested a young man at the school where he taught. I say “supposedly” because he was never charged, never tried, never convicted.
(2) During the next 35 years, nothing much happens, except that the statute of limitations on the supposed molestation runs out. You may not think that’s a good idea, (and I completely agree). and the State of Illinois has now corrected it, but because the state is subject to the U.S. Constitution, they can’t make that retroactive. Note that the supposed victim allows the statute to run out without ever making a report.
(3) Sometime in the last few years, the supposed victim finds out that Hastert is now rolling in dough as a result of lobbying activity subsequent to his leaving Congress. You may not think that sort of lobbying income is a good idea (and I completely agree), but since both Democrats and Republicans make tens of millions this way, I’m not holding my breath till -this- gets corrected.
(4) The supposed victim, knowing that Hastert is rolling in cash, decides to get in at the trough. Note that (a) the supposed victim said nothing for 30+ years, until there was a good rea$on, and (b) he could not now have threatened to go to the police (see #2 above), so it’s likely that the threat was to go to the media. By the way, note that extortion is a crime.
(5) Hastert starts making the cash payments. His bank notices the pattern and reports this to the feds (I think this law borders on totalitarian and were I the USSC I would throw it in the ashcan without a split second of doubt).
(6) The feds question Hastert about what he’s doing with the money. Here is where Hastert shoots himself in the foot. Perhaps not realizing that paying an extortionist is not a crime, he makes up a bullshit story. What he should have done is said, “I didn’t do anything illegal with that cash, and if you think I did, I guess I’ll see you in court.”
(7) The feds find out that Hastert was in fact paying blackmail. How, I don’t know. Either Hastert cracked under further questioning, or the supposed victim, realizing that the golden goose had laid its last egg (sorry about the gender-mixed metaphor there), decided to leak the info to the feds.
(8) Now this is conjecture on my part. What goes through the prosecutor’s mind is something like, "I think this guy molested a kid. But because the statute of limitations has run out, he’ll never do a day in jail for that. And I may or may not be able to make the cash withdrawal charge stick. What I CAN do, though, is leak enough information about what he did with the money (“It was sex. Sex with a male is what it was about. That’s S-E-X, mister newsman…) so as to make sure that the rest of his life is completely ruined.”
OK, chgoliz, where do you stand on this?
I have several friends who believe that pedophilia is The Allegation About Which No Rules Need Apply. Whatever it takes, whatever, to nail an accused pedophile’s hide to the jailhouse wall is Just OK With Them.
Are you in that company?
If not, do you see anything at all wrong about the case as I’ve laid it out here?
Yeah. You haven’t laid out a case; you’ve laid out the best excuse you can think of for each and every step that you have listed.
How do you know there is only exactly one victim? (Hint: it’s extraordinarily unlikely.) How do you know they weren’t paid hush money from the start, at lower amounts? How do you know only one person has been paid hush money?
And sexual assault against a minor isn’t sex. IT. ISN’T.SEX. Stop calling it sex, as if it were a consenting relationship between two equals.
If Hastert didn’t do anything wrong then none of this story makes any goddamn sense. Would you pay out a dime, let alone $3.5 million, to someone who threatened to falsely accuse you of sexual assault against a minor?
I’ve mentored underage kids. It’s hard to imagine one of them threatening to accuse me of such a thing, but if they did I certainly wouldn’t pay them off to cover up a crime that never happened.
Paying hush money is not a crime. Check it out. It’s not a crime. No matter what’s being hushed up, or how bad it was. Demanding hush money, amazingly enough, IS a crime!!
“IT. ISN’T.SEX.” Fair enough, but if the original article had not quoted the feds …“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 told reporters.”… I would not have gone there in my post.
I still want to know if you think the prosecutor did the right thing by disclosing the supposed reasons for the hush money, and whether prosecutors ought to have that sort of discretion (to ruin accused A’s life, and give accused B a pass).
Oh, did I forget to mention that paying an extortionist is not a crime???
That’s not the point.
In my world, you arrest someone for molesting a kid if you think you can prove that he molested a kid, and there is a law in effect under which he can be convicted. You don’t get to drag unproven allegations in front of the news media to ruin his life just because that’s all you’ve got to work with.
If Hastert didn’t do anything wrong
As a combox commentator, you are entitled to try, convict and execute Denny Hastert on this page to your heart’s content. No presumption of innocence applies here. But Federal prosecutors must be required to play by the rules.
Know what’s interesting? You don’t have any more evidence that “prosecutors dragged unproven allegations of child molestation in front of the news media” than I do that “Hastert molested one more more kids.” The sources are all as-yet unnamed. The sources are anonymous, the details yet to be revealed. Theoretically, any wholly impartial commentator might wait before passing any judgement at all.
Yet when it comes to choosing a side, you went with the guy accused of molesting a child.
The side I choose to take is the side that’s opposed to prosecutorial misconduct and bad laws. No matter what the cause in which they are utilized.
(Edit) Again… if as a country we want to go after child molesters, then we need laws against child molestation, and we need to prosecute the accused molesters based upon those laws, and convict if there is evidence that those laws were broken. I am fine with that.
What I am not fine with is these bullshit proxy laws such as the law against privacy in how one handles one’s own cash, and the law against lying to the feds. These are used by prosecutors to nail people in cases where they have no way of ever being able to convict of the supposed underlying crime. And boy, do they not want me on a grand jury, because I will vote to nullify that kind of shit every day I’m in the room.
You know that Al Capone WAS actually guilty of tax evasion, right?
Not relevant.
A reasonable case can be made that tax evasion is a crime in its own right, as opposed to not telling the government when moving cash out of a bank, or lying to the cops. (The latter is in my opinion every American’s birthright).
If Hastert didn’t like this kind of rule he could have used the considerable power and influence he wielded as the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives in history to change it. He seemed just fine to let it stand when it was used to go after people who dealt drugs or engaged in other criminal activity, so I’m sure not going to shed any tears if this corrupt, lying, hypocritical, child-molesting sack of shit is inconvenienced by it now.
Did you know that it’s illegal to know about a felony and not report it? Federal law: misprision of felony. If the person who committed the felony pays you to not report the crime, they are committing an additional crime. Not only that, but teachers and coaches are Mandatory Reporters for crimes against minors in Illinois.
And yes, it is, in fact, illegal to purposely alter how you are moving money out of your bank to circumvent federal law on reporting.
You’ve convinced me that Hastert is guilty of even more crimes than I thought.
Retroactive to the 1970’s?? If not, then irrelevant.
And as I said above, if I’m in a jury pool where “circumventing federal law on reporting” is the case, I’ll go out of my way to conceal my views so I get picked. Then I’ll vote to nullify, and do everything I can to get the other jurors to go along. No matter who the accused is, or what the underlying crime may be.
