The guy's been ill, isn't up for multiple investigations into his earlier sexual and financial delinquencies -- even though he's a fairly recent Congressional Republican leader. Anyway,the statute of limitations has run out on his buggering of schoolkids when he was a coach. Ugly stuff.
In a court filing late Friday, making suggestions for a judge who will decide Mr. Hastert’s sentence, the prosecutors described specific, graphic incidents that they say occurred when Mr. Hastert was a popular, championship-winning coach in a small Illinois town in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. The “known acts,” the prosecutors said, consisted of “intentional touching of minors’ groin area and genitals or oral sex with a minor.”
“The actions at the core of this case took place not on the defendant’s national public stage but in his private one-on-one encounters in an empty locker room and a motel room with minors that violated the special trust between those young boys and their coach,” the prosecutors wrote. ...NYT
The financial problems have to do with money used to try to shut up the victims of his predations. Those banking transgressions led investigators to his treatment of children.
What's important (aside from the effect of these abuses on the kids, now adults, who were abused) is what these behaviors mean when the crop up, as they so often do in people whose lives are spent trying to hide in holier-than-thou conservatism. What's important is that this was a rogue member of the House but that the perp became a leader, a chosen star, a standard bearer for the self-righteous Republican party.
The punishment --if applied? Six months in prison.
