The sordid details have emerged about why Dennis Hastert the former speaker of the House of Representatives agreed to pay $3.5 million to someone. It turns out that he had molested students while he was a high school wrestling coach before he went into politics and that this was hush money when they threatened to reveal it.
When the story of the payments first came to light without the reasons, I was struck by how someone who had gone straight from being a high school teacher to state and national elected office could have become so wealthy and I wrote about it then.
There are other strange facts especially that when Hastert entered Congress in 1987, he had a net worth of at most $270,000 but when he left twenty years later he had between $4 million and $17 million. That amounts to increases in worth between $200,000 to $850,000 per year, with even the lower figure being well above his annual congressional salary. So either his wife was earning a huge amount of money or he is one helluva financial wizard when it comes to investing.
After he left office, he became (what else?) a highly paid lobbyist. But how did he get to be so wealthy before he left Congress? There are suggestions that he would buy property that he knew would become much more valuable because of congressional actions that he pushed through, and then sell them at huge profits. No doubt lobbyists and wealthy donors would help in this scheme and use this kind of mechanism to circumvent bribery and lobbying laws. As I keep saying, what is a scandal is not what is illegal but what is legal.
What I would like to see is a full-fledged investigation into how he acquired so much money on a government salary.
I wondered about this myself. Science just doesn’t pay.
There are suggestions that he would buy property that he knew would become much more valuable because of congressional actions that he pushed through, and then sell them at huge profits.
Politicians have been pulling that trick since before Rome became a thing.
and that’s why I advocate a blind trust. The legislator should not be able to manipulate his investments or properties. Other neutral parties should have control over the allocation.
… he would buy property that he knew would become much more valuable because of congressional actions that he pushed through…
He could just as easily (maybe more so) have received investment tips on unrelated enterprises from people set up to profit from different congressional actions. Much less of a paper trail that way.
Me, too. Question is, an Investigation by whom?
For the most part, it’s not a huge mystery around his old district where his income came from, even if the details can be murky. The past twenty years or so have been a huge transformation there from rural farmland to a mix of suburban residential, commercial, and light industrial development; and a whole bunch of people made a huge pile of money from those developments. Hastert’s pile is just one of many, though it definitely is a big one for someone who wasn’t actually in the real estate business full-time. There may have been a couple of suspicious instances where infrastructure projects got pointed in convenient directions for Hastert’s income, but as far as I know never so suspicious as to be obviously intended for his benefit rather than the region.
What’s very clear is that he was remarkably good at buying up cheap property that was destined to become expensive property in the very near (2-3 years) future. How much of that was due to actual inside information and how much due to just having the ‘big picture’ handle on where development was headed is hard to say, and harder to prove. Unless someone can find someone with direct knowledge who’s willing to talk about it, of course.