The Hastert Case Isn't Just About Him Raping A Handful Of Underage Boys-- Is It Bigger Than Watergate?

On the day the House was bidding a fond adieu to one corrupt Speaker, the corrupt Republican who played Speaker before Boehner, Denny Hastert, pleaded guilty to one carefully constructed charge of "structuring," evading reporting requirements in connection to a multimillion dollar blackmail scheme. As part of the deal Hastert admitted he knew what he was doing was illegal and said "I didn’t want them to know how I intended to spend the money." The part of the indictment that charged Hastert with lying to the FBI was dropped as part of the plea deal. The sentencing isn't until February 29 but federal prosecutors recommended a teeny-weeny wrist slap-- a fine and between zero and six months in prison.

For several years, we've covered the actual basis of Hastert's dilemma-- his serial rapes of underage males. But there's another aspect of this that been whispered about in Washington also for as many years. Yes, Hastert was being blackmailed by some of the boys-- now grown men-- who he used to rape. But was he also being blackmailed by foreign intelligence agencies? DWT has been writing about it since 2006. Last week, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, writing for the American Conservative brought up Israel and Turkey.

As former House Speaker Dennis Hastert prepares to plead guilty in accordance with a deal he has made with federal prosecutors, most media will focus on the crimes the FBI mentioned in his indictment. Since Hastert was charged in May, the public has been shocked to learn that the former high-school wrestling coach allegedly spent large sums trying to cover up past sexual abuse. But one prominent whistleblower has been speaking up about the possible misdeeds of Hastert for years now-- and the way that they may have compromised national security.

Longtime readers of the American Conservative are familiar with the Sibel Edmonds saga. Edmonds, an FBI translator who revealed large-scale corruption throughout the government, has received multiple gag orders under the State Secrets Act. She has nevertheless persevered in spite of concerns that she would be prosecuted and possibly imprisoned. TAC interviewed her for a feature article in 2009, and I also reviewed her claims multiple times over the last few years, including when her book Classified Woman came out in 2012.

Many of Edmonds’s claims involved Turkish and Israeli front groups seeking to influence U.S. policy while sometimes also engaging in illegal activity. The scope of the corruption allegedly involved bribery of senior government officials and congressmen, arranging for export licenses to countries that were embargoed, and the exposure of classified information. Edmonds has been questioned by a congressional committee, by individual congressmen and staffers, as well as by the FBI inspector general, and her information was found to be “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review.” She also provided interviews for “60 Minutes” and Vanity Fair, both of which were able to confirm key elements of her story.



...In the course of her various media appearances, Edmonds provided significant information on Congressman Hastert, who was under FBI investigation while he was speaker of the House, a role he assumed in 1999 and held for eight years. In her TAC interview, Edmonds related that “In early 1997, because of the information that the FBI was getting on the Turkish diplomatic community, the Justice Department had already started to investigate several Republican congressmen. The number-one congressman involved with the Turkish community, both in terms of providing information and doing favors, was Bob Livingston. Number-two after him was Dan Burton, and then he became number-one until Hastert became the speaker of the House. Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, was briefed on the investigations, and since they were Republicans, she authorized that they be continued… In 1999, [FBI agents in the Chicago field office] wiretapped the congressmen directly.”

In a deposition given in August 2009, Edmonds identified Hastert as “one of the primary U.S. persons involved in operations and activities that are not legal, and they’re not for the interest of the United States but for the interest of foreign governments and foreign entities.” She detailed what she believed to be Hastert’s wrongdoing: “This information has been public. The concerns, again would be several categories. The acceptance of large sums of bribery in forms of cash or laundered cash and laundering is to make it look legal for his campaigns, and also for his personal use, in order to do certain favors and call certain-- call for certain actions, make certain things happen for foreign entities and foreign governments’ interests, Turkish government’s interest and Turkish business entities’ interests.”

When asked in the deposition, “Did you have reason to believe that Mr. Hastert, for example, killed one of the Armenian genocide resolutions in exchange for money from these Turkish organizations?” she responded, “Yes, I do… Correct… and not only taking money, but other activities, too, including being blackmailed for various reasons.” At the time of the deposition Hastert had left Congress and was working for the Washington lobbying firm Dickstein Shapiro as a registered lobbyist for Turkey, reportedly earning millions of dollars in commissions.

Edmonds described her work on Turkish-language transcripts of investigations relating to Hastert covering the period 1996 until January 2003, elaborating on the possibility of blackmail. She recalled that Hastert “used the townhouse [in Chicago] that was not his residence for certain not very morally accepted activities. Now, whether that was being used as blackmail I don’t know, but the fact that foreign entities [Turkey and Israel] knew about this, in fact, they sometimes participated in some of those not maybe morally well activities in that particular townhouse that was supposed to be an office, not a house, residence at certain hours, certain days, evenings of the week. So I can’t say if that was used as blackmail or not, but certain activities they would share. They were known.”

In testimony before congressional staffers and committees, Edmonds has reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast of their secret relationship with a “Hastert.” They discussed giving him tens of thousands of dollars in clandestine payments in exchange for political favors and information. Many of the transcripts involved a suspect at the city’s Turkish Consulate, as well as several members of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, business entities that some FBI agents believed served as occasional covers for organized crime. Some calls appeared to be referring to drug shipments and other possible crimes.



...Fast forward to the Dennis Hastert case making the rounds today, which focuses on relatively minor federal banking laws and ignores the other evidence that has been collected by the FBI on Hastert for the past 20 years. One has to ask, “Why Hastert and why now?”, but there does not seem to be a simple answer. It might be little more than the result of frustrated FBI investigators demanding that some action be taken.

Edmonds, for her part, has described how the Hastert case has been ignored by the media and has predicted that it would eventually be made to go away by the government. Indeed, legal action following up on the original indictment has been delayed through postponement after postponement and more recently sidetracked into a plea bargain that will allow the former congressman to plead guilty to reduced charges while at the same time sealing forever the unsavory details linked to his being blackmailed.

Hastert and his lawyers understand that they are well placed to effectively threaten the government prosecutors because Hastert knows where a lot of bodies are buried, metaphorically speaking. By demanding that the investigative files on him-- which could include reports of illegal activity by a broad range of former officials-- be released as part of his defense, he can force the government to drop or mitigate the charges against him. It is a ploy similar to that used by alleged AIPAC spies Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman in 2009, which led to the presiding judge’s dismissal of the case.

Glenn Greenwald writes that “Those with political and financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions whatsoever. Often they need not even exploit their access to superior lawyers because they don’t see the inside of a courtroom in the first place-- not even when they get caught in the most egregious criminality.” There is a particular irony here: criminals in high office may avoid punishment through their willingness to implicate their peers who are engaged in much the same practices, in effect blackmailing the government to leave them alone or face the consequences. That is what the Dennis Hastert story appears to be all about.

Oh, and you might want to listen to this report too if this case interests you and you think we should have less corrupt people in government. If not, nevermind.

UPDATE: Irony?

On the same day that Hastert plead guilty, the House Republicans seem to have ended the odious Hastert Rule which dictated that only legislation that had at least 50% of Republicans backing it could come to the floor for a vote. Yesterday, within hours of Hastert's judicial disgrace, Patrick Meehan (R-PA) brought up the compromise Budget-- with co-sponsors Tom Reed (R-NY) and Peter Roskam (R-IL)-- and it passed with just 79 Republican votes. 167 GOP nihilists and extremists voted NO. The Southern Republicans were foiled when every single Democrat-- 187-- joined with the 79 Republicans to pass the budget and prevent another of the government shutdowns that Ted Cruz and the crazed and venal anti-USA faction love so much.

Late Friday Newsdump: House Ethics Committee Finds Mean Jean Schmidt Took Bribes From A Foreign Power

Mean Jean Schmidt wasn't born with that name. Her parents christened her with the far more ladylike Jeannette Marie Hoffman. The Schmidt part came in when she married shady stockbroker Peter Schmidt, and she earned the "Mean" after her shocking debut on the House floor (November 18, 2005), when she started screeching at respected ex-Marine and war hero Jack Murtha that he was a coward for wanting to bring U.S. troops home from Iraq, deceptively blaming the entire incident on another Ohio right-wing kook, state Rep. Danny Bubp. Schmidt was ordered by John Boehner to lay low, but she's like a Tourette's victim and was soon accusing Obama of having been born in another country and not being constitutionally President of the United States.

Schmidt hasn't had any impact at all in Congress and is widely considered an embarrassment and one of the least influential members of the House. The only other thing she's known for is her dogged opposition to the legitimate aspirations of the Armenian-American community. Schmidt, a dim bulb, isn't exactly someone would expect to even know anything about Armenia or Armenians. But she has been taking bribes from shady Turkish sources and helps run their anti-Armenian efforts. Friday the House Ethics Committee issued their report on her corruption, but decided not to recommend expulsion or arrest, claiming, in effect, that she was too dumb to know she had violated House rules. You have to be pretty dumb to not know taking bribes is against the rules... and the law.

According to the OCE referral, Representative Schmidt received an impermissible gift from the Turkish Coalition of America (TCA) when lawyers provided legal services to Representative Schmidt in at least three related matters and then sent bills for their fees to the TCA, which paid those bills on an ongoing basis. According to aCE's referral, between 2008 and 2010 TCA actually paid her lawyers, who claimed to be acting as the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund (TALDF), a project of TCA, approximately $500,000 for legal services provided to Representative Schmidt. Neither the Committee nor, according to the evidence, Representative Schmidt was aware of these payments when the Committee previously provided advice to Representative Schmidt regarding her options for paying legal fees in the various proceedings.

The Committee's review of the matter indicated that Representative Schmidt did, in fact, receive an impermissible gift from TCA as aCE has alleged, and therefore the Committee did not dismiss the aCE matter. However, the Committee has found that Representative Schmidt's lawyers failed to inform her of their payment arrangement with TCA, and made false and misleading statements to her about their relationship with TCA and TALDF. Because Representative Schmidt did not know she was receiving a gift from TCA, the Committee has determined that no sanction is appropriate in this case. However, the gift was impermissible, and Representative Schmidt must now disclose and repay the gift. Representative Schmidt has worked in good faith with the Committee since September 2009 to determine the appropriate ways to pay her lawyers.

Through a letter to Representative Schmidt issued contemporaneously with the Committee's Report, the Committee has given her guidance on how to appropriately repay the bills which were paid by TCA. In sum, Representative Schmidt must: 1) ensure that TCA does not pay for any further legal services on her behalf; 2) pay from a permissible source the lawyers associated with TALDF for all legal services they performed to date; 3) amend her 2009 and 2010 Financial Disclosure Statements to disclose the gifts from TCA; and 4) disclose any unpaid legal fees from TCA as liabilities on her future Financial Disclosure Statements, until the lawyers associated with TALDF have been repaid in full. This remedy requires any attorney who was actually paid with TCA funds to first agree that they will repay the fees TCA originally paid to them.

David Krikorian, a rival who brought Mean Jean's criminal behavior to light and who Mean Jean is suing for defamation of her "good" character, said, "The Ethics Committee proved that we were right all along-- Rep Schmidt has received a half a million dollars in improper gifts from the Turkish Coalition of America... Personally I find it hard to believe that Jean Schmidt did not know the facts regarding her own attorneys in legal actions which she commenced in her own name-- I find that to be laughable! The American people are tired of Congressmen and women who break the rules and get away with it by blaming someone else-- the the people of Ohio's second district deserve better than an ignorant Congresswoman."

BUSH AND CHENEY SHOULD BE IMPEACHED

Today's Washington Post carries an op-ed by George McGovern, callin, eloquently for the impeachment of Bush and Cheney. Let's hope Pelosi and her detestable Insider cabal are paying attention. McGovern's premise, that the Bush Regime is far worse than Nixon, should be apparent to anyone who has been paying attention since 2000, and McGovern reluctantly comes to the conclusion that the only honorable way for America to move forward is for Bush and Cheney to face impeachment. He seems as dismayed by the ruthless, narrow and blind partisanship of Republicans as by his own party's "lack of courage and statesmanship."

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly "high crimes and misdemeanors," to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team's assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged-- perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion-- by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an "imminent threat" to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks-- another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson's observation: "Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world-- more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies-- especially the war in Iraq-- have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: "I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans." Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, "it wasn't until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)-- and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country's laws-- that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law-- and repeatedly violates the law-- thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors."

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won't be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I'd like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

This morning's Times of London carries two unrelated stories that Americans still on the fence about impeachment might want to think about. One involves former FBI whistleblower/translator Sibel Edmonds who has given the Times some startling information about Bush Regime officials involved with treason, including selling nuclear secrets to Pakistan. It is also widely believed that Edmonds heard tapes showing that then GOP House Speaker Denny Hastert was taking huge cash bribes from Turkey.

Bush's perverted and criminal Justice Department "has imposed a state secrets privilege order on her, which prevents her revealing more details of the FBI’s methods and current investigations. Her allegations were heard in a closed session of Congress, but no action has been taken and she continues to campaign for a public hearing... One of the CIA sources confirmed that the Turks had acquired nuclear secrets from the United States and shared the information with Pakistan and Israel. 'We have no indication that Turkey has its own nuclear ambitions. But the Turks are traders. To my knowledge they became big players in the late 1990s,' the source said."

The other Times story isn't about criminal or impeachable offenses. But it's one that may help Americans make up their minds about Bush. In the 1800s people in England enjoyed a higher standard of living than Americans. Since then America has eclipsed the U.K.-- until Bush, who never paid any attention at Harvard Business School, came along. After 8 years of economic mismanagement, likely to result in a severe recession, the American standard of living will have dropped below England's.

Bush has been a failure his entire life. Everything he has put his hand to has turned to shit. There was never any reason to suspect the same would not be true of the United States government. That may make him unpopular enough for an impeachment trial based on his impeachable activities, and for criminal trials for his cronies, to move forward. How much longer will the execrable Nancy Pelosi keep impeachment off the table. Voters in San Francisco owe it to America to remove this disgraceful political hack from office.

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