Former speaker of the US House of Representatives Dennis Hastert has been charged with lying to the FBI and evading banking laws over the alleged payment of hush money to a victim of "prior bad acts".
Mr Hastert, who was speaker from 1999-2007, was indicted on federal grand jury charges on Thursday in a case that has stunned the Washington political establishment.
Prosecutors claim that in or around 2010 the former high-school teacher and coach agreed to pay an individual from his hometown of Yorkville $3.5 million (€3.2 million) to “compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct”, according to the US justice department indictment.
In the case brought in the district court of Northern Illinois, Hastert (73) was charged by the department and the US tax authority, the IRS, with illegally transferring the funds in an effort to avoid detection by the taxman in a scheme known as "structuring".
'Bad acts'
News website Buzzfeed, which first reported the charges, said that although the indictment does not specify the "bad acts", they are said to date back to before Mr Hastert started his career in politics in 1980.
He worked as a wrestling coach and teacher at a school in suburban Chicago from 1965 until he entered public office.
The FBI began investigating cash withdrawals allegedly made by the Illinois Republican in 2013, “as possible structuring of currency transactions to evade the reporting requirements,” the indictment says.
Asked by investigators in an interview in December 2014 whether the cash withdrawals related to his lack of trust in the banking system, he told the FBI: “Yeah . . . I kept the cash. That’s what I’m doing.”
The indictment alleges that the former politician, who worked as a lobbyist in Washington since 2010, withdrew about $1.7 million in cash from 2010-2014, including 15 withdrawals of $50,000 from various bank accounts between June 2010 and April 2012.
Three months after being questioned by bank representatives about the withdrawals in April 2012, he started withdrawing cash in increments of less than $10,000 and that he provided sums of $50,000 to the unnamed individual “at pre-arranged meeting places and times”.
The payments increased to $100,000 every three months in 2014, a year after the FBI and IRS started investigating him.
Prosecutors say he split up withdrawals totalling $952,000 in cash in order to evade banking reporting requirements.
The former politician remains free, according to the court document. Bail was set in the case at $4,500.
Resigned
On Thursday, after the charges became public, he resigned as a board member of the CME Group, the company behind the Chicago and New York Mercantile Exchanges. He also stepped down as a lobbyist at the Washington DC-based law firm Dickstein Shapiro.
Mr Hastert was first elected to the Illinois state legislature in 1980 and then to the US Congress in 1986. He succeeded Republican Newt Gingrich in 1998 after a Louisiana Republican in line to replace him suddenly resigned as a result of an extramarital affair.
His name is associated with a congressional rule, the Hastert rule, which prevents a piece of legislation reaching the floor of the House unless a “majority of the majority” in a party supports the Bill.
