Having watched many of these stories unfold in real time, I left work yesterday with a sense of foreboding about the late-breaking Hastert story – something like seeing a fuse already lit and waiting for a bomb to explode. And yet, to my great surprise, we’re into the next day and no news organization appears to have uncovered, at least in a publishable form, what happened.
The prominent reference to Hastert’s days as a high school wrestling coach in the late 1960s and 1970s as well as other assertions in the document strongly suggests that the “misconduct” at the center at what appears to have been the blackmailing of Hastert happened during and was in some fashion connected to that job. The scale of the agreed upon payment, $3.5 million is massive, even for a man like Hastert who had build up a substantial personal fortune during his time in public office and decamped to an extremely high paid lobbying job after leaving the House of Representatives. Beyond that though, we don’t know anything. And even that is just a strong inference, not proof of anything.
I am frankly surprised that details of the underlying story haven’t already leaked out.
