Free Republic

Following McCarthy's ouster, acting Speaker Patrick McHenry ordered Nancy Pelosi to leave the special hideaway office she didn't relinquish following her party's defeat in the 2022 mid-terms. The email notifying Pelosi's office of the order to get out got right to the point, noting that the office will be re-keyed if she doesn't leave. As one of his first acts as the acting speaker, Rep. Patrick McHenry ordered former Speaker Nancy Pelosi to vacate her Capitol hideaway office by Wednesday, according to an email sent to her office viewed by POLITICO. “Please vacate the space tomorrow, the room will be...

A judge on Tuesday ordered supervised release conditions tightened for former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, including barring him from possessing pornography, using sex chat lines or having any contact with minors except in the presence of an adult who is aware of his conviction related to the sexual abuse of boys decades ago. The order from U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin appeared to be based on a report submitted under seal by the probation department a day earlier. The docket in Hastert’s case was updated Tuesday with a lengthy order from the judge issuing a host of new restrictions...

House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, with his job on the line because of the spiraling Mark Foley cyberspace page sex scandal, was duped Tuesday into letting a stranger into his Plano home -- a serious security breach. Hastert literally let his guard down and allowed in his house a hustling, self-promoting evangelist little known in this country, the Houston-based K.A. Paul, who at 7:30 a.m. arrived at the speaker's home with a camera-wielding associate. How Paul and his aide, Dennis Ryan, got to Hastert's door is a tale of apparent chance. How the publicity-hungry Paul and Ryan walked through it...

Ben Sasse and the rest of the GOP elite claim Trump is a menace who must be stopped “on principle.” Sasse and others have criticized Trump for not disavowing racists quickly enough (even though Trump disavowed racists repeatedly). Sasse has a bigger problem – he supported a pedophile. Some suspect he used his position of authority to enable abuse. Ben Sasse was in charge of supervising underage boys, who were later abused by members of Congress. Ben Sasse was a tutor in the Congressional page program from 1996 to 1998. The Congressional page program brings underage boys to Congress to...

CHICAGO —A federal judge on Wednesday sentenced former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert to 15 months in federal prison — a term above what even prosecutors had recommended and one that clearly takes into account the sexual abuse allegations that generated the criminal case against the Illinois Republican. The sentencing marked an ignominious moment in the life of a man who was once a revered high school teacher and wrestling coach in Illinois and who ascended into the highest ranks of American politics. Even before the hearing, prosecutors had revealed in court filings how Hastert allegedly had molested or inappropriately...

WLS just announced that Dennis Hastert has been sentenced to 2 years of supervised release and no contact with those he had molested.

CHICAGO — Federal prosecutors on Friday for the first time provided details of sexual abuse allegations against J. Dennis Hastert, the former speaker of the House, asserting that he molested at least four boys, as young as 14, when he worked as a high school wrestling coach decades ago. Mr. Hastert, 74, is not charged with the incidents of abuse because of statutes of limitation, prosecutors said, but he was accused last year of illegally structuring bank withdrawals for money he was paying to one of his victims in an effort to hide the abuse. He pleaded guilty in October...

Another man who alleges he was sexually abused by former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert years ago as well as the sister of another alleged victim could testify at Hastert's upcoming sentencing on charges he paid hush money to cover up wrongdoing in his past, the Tribune has learned. For the first time, prosecutors and lawyers for Hastert revealed in an unannounced hearing Tuesday that the Illinois Republican had been accused of sexual abuse from when he was high school wrestling coach and teacher in Yorkville decades ago, according to a transcript of the hearing obtained by the Tribune. In...

What We Know So Far Hastert, the former Speaker of the House, was indicted Thursday on federal charges of evading reporting requirements and lying to the FBI The Illinois Republican allegedly agreed to pay an unnamed individual $3.5 million for previous misconduct Source: Investigators considered including a second alleged victim in the Hastert indictment, but ultimately chose not to do so. A source familiar with the investigation told BuzzFeed News that U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon considered but did not pursue additional charges against former Speaker Dennis Hastert, which would have included a reference to an Individual B, one of potentially...

Federal prosecutors on Thursday indicted former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert on charges of purposefully withdrawing less than $10,000 in order to evade... Violations: Title 18, United States Code, Section 1001(a)(2); Title 31, United States Code,Section 5324

Lavrenti Beria, who ran Josef Stalin’s KGB, once commented on the ease with which the feared organization he headed could convict any individual at will: “Show me the man and I’ll find you the crime.” But that was early 20th Century Soviet Union, and this is 21st Century America, you might say; we have all manner of procedural safeguards in place to guard against individuals being charged and convicted of things not truly evil or harmful to others. Ahh, were it so. Just how easy is it in 21st Century America to run afoul of one or more of the...

Dennis Hastert has not been indicted on a charge of sexual abuse, nor has he been indicted on a charge of paying money he was not legally allowed to pay. The indictment of Mr. Hastert, a former House speaker, released last week, lays out two counts: taking money out of the bank the wrong way, and then lying to the F.B.I. about what he did with the money. Does that make sense? Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic, for example, is worried that the indictment constitutes government overreach, punishing Mr. Hastert for concealing payments whose disclosure he may have thought would...

Steve Reinboldt was the student equipment manager when Hastert worked at Yorkville High school in Illinois in the 1970s and 80s His sister Jolene Reinboldt said Steve told her he was gay 8 years after high school and at the same time revealed his first same-sex experience 'was with Dennis Hastert' Steve Reinboldt died of AIDS in 1995. His sister confronted Dennis Hastert with the allegations when the politician turned up to Steve's funeral Hastert, 73, has not responded to the allegations He was indicted last week on accusations he agreed to pay $3.5m 'hush money' to ensure someone...

It took 20 years for Jolene Reinboldt to have anyone take her story seriously. After her brother Steve died of AIDS in 1995, she was shocked to see Dennis Hastert, her brother’s teacher and coach in high school, show up for the viewing. She followed Hastert out to the parking lot and told him she knew his secret, and then tried for years to get law enforcement and news agencies to investigate it, all to no avail. Two weeks ago, though, the FBI came calling and wanted to hear her story for themselves as part of an investigation into...

In Steve Reinboldt’s 1970 high school yearbook, wrestling coach Dennis Hastert wrote that Steve was his “great, right hand man” as the student equipment manager of the Yorkville, Illinois wrestling team. But Steve was also a victim of sexual abuse at the hands of Hastert, Steve’s sister said today in an interview with ABC News. It is the first time an alleged Hastert victim has been identified by name since his indictment for lying to the FBI and violating federal banking laws to cover-up past misconduct. Hastert, due in court next week, has not responded to the allegations. In an...

In the past few weeks we've learned that Josh Dugger was a child molester, former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was a child molester and the Methodist Church in the UK has apologized for 2,000 cases of abuse dating back to 1950. Child molesters can be found in the highest reaches of politics. Molesters can be television celebrities. And molesters can ply their abuse under the cover of the church. With abusers that pervasive it makes sense to learn more about the perpetrators. Thanks to an excellent article in The Jewish Woman we can. The really bad news in...

Yesterday I started to delve into the Dennis Hastert case, paying particular attention to the specific crimes with which the former Speaker is being charged. But even after I finished writing about it and reading some of the comments here, I wasn’t very happy with my conclusions. There’s something very unsettling about the entire case (leaving out the obvious, horrible alleged child rape parts of it) but I felt that I wasn’t quite able to put my finger on it. Today I found someone who has done a better job of wrestling those questions to the ground and it...

Wheaton College, the prominent Evangelical alma mater of former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert said Sunday that it had removed his name from a center named after him since his scandalous indictment for illegally transferring funds to dodge the IRS and lying to the FBI. Reports surfaced last week alleging that Hastert had sexually molested a male victim to whom he recently paid hush money in violation of federal banking laws, according to a federal law enforcement official briefed on the case. The 73-year-old Wheaton graduate was indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury that charged that he had violated...

As a Democrat, I know I’m supposed to cheer now that former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) has been charged with federal crimes. But, in fact, I feel just the opposite. It looks to me like he got a raw deal, and ended up the victim of an overzealous federal prosecutor. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t condone Hastert’s rumored sexual abuse of a former student, if that’s what happened. But if that student still felt harmed, so many years later, why didn’t he go to the police instead of going to Hastert and hitting him up for hush money?...

<p>Despite 6-1/2 years of horrid governance and dozens of acknowledged scandals, several of which a few of the credible remaining outposts of liberal thought have actually agreed are scandals, David Brooks, the New York Times's resident fake conservative, asserted on Friday's PBS NewsHour, as if it's an indisputable fact, that "President Obama has run an amazingly scandal-free administration, not only he himself, but the people around him."</p>