Yesterday, when the Hastert news first broke, I went in thinking that the timeline made sense because Denny Hastert, like so many other politicians, got an extremely lucrative job as a lobbyist after leaving Congress. When Individual A approached Hastert in 2010 asking for money, that made sense because it was only then that he had the kind of wealth that would make it even remotely conceivable for him to pay out $3.5 million.
I’d assumed that he’d started making money in 2007 from a cold start. But I’d forgotten that Hastert, who entered public life in the middle class, left public office a very wealth man.
In the main, Hastert did it with real estate speculation. And there were always claims that he’d leveraged his government role to do so – buying property in proximity to where the government either was or could start doing business of its own. We looked at the time and the details didn’t line up quite as tightly as his critics suggested.
But at a minimum Hastert had gotten access to the kinds of lucrative deals, often from major donors or other politically connected people, that allowed him to become a very wealthy man. In 2006, his last year as Speaker, his average net worth was an estimated $4.6 million.
This chart from OpenSecrets.org shows that 2004 to 2006, the heyday of Hastert’s Speakership were very, very good years financially.
It’s important to understand what these numbers mean. Congressional financial disclosures provide ranges of the value for different assets. (You can find his actual financial disclosure reports here.) These numbers are the maximum value of assets minus debts. So his net worth could have been and almost certainly was less than the near $8 million shown here. And the precipitous drop from 2004 to 2006 could also be in part an artifact in shifts in these ranges.
That said, a lot of luck came Hastert’s way from 2004 to 2005.
One of the big focuses of interest around that time was a land investment a few miles away from a future highway, which Hastert had a key role securing federal dollars for. Here’s some of our discussion of it at the time. At the time it was reported that this transaction netted Hastert bewteen $1.5 and $2 million. The land was purchase in 2002 and 2004 and sold at the end of 2005. So a significant amount of the ramp up in 2005 was based on that deal.
Hastert was never accused of a crime. And, needless to say, this is the least of his worries today.
But it still leaves me curious. Why did the person come calling on Hastert in 2010, apparently thirty years or more after the misconduct. There are plenty of possible reasons. It could be as simple as for Individual A, it was time.
But Hastert was vulnerable – in the sense of being a pretty wealthy man – some years before that.
