It was quite a shock to hear that former Speaker Denny Hastert had been indicted under a law used to prevent people from concealing movements of major amounts of cash. So what could it possibly be about and why was Hastert trying to conceal the movement of roughly $1 million in cash.
We now have the indictment and the charges stem from Hastert’s efforts to pay off an unnamed individual to conceal “past misconduct by defendant against [the individual] that had occurred years earlier.”
The unnamed individual, who the indictment says Hastert has known almost his entire life, allegedly approached Hastert in 2010 and raised the issue of the past “misconduct”. Based on this Hastert agreed to pay a person the indictment refers to as “Individual A” the sum of $3.5 million “in order to compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct against Individual A.”
Through 2014 he had paid Individual A a total of $1.7 million. And it was his effort to conceal these transactions that led to the ‘structuring’ that is the basis of the indictment. (Structuring is breaking up large transactions into a number of smaller transactions in order to evade the various reporting requirements that US banking system uses to track large movements of cash.) Hastert then allegedly compounded this by lying to the FBI about the nature of the transactions during their investigation and using the cover story that he was withdrawing massive sums of money because he had lost confidence in the US banking system.
Yes, really.
