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posted by n1 on Wednesday June 03 2015, @05:31PM   Printer-friendly
from the criminal-class dept.

Dennis Hastert is about the least sympathetic figure one can imagine. The former House Speaker got filthy rich as a lobbyist trading on contacts he gained in office, his leadership coincided with Congress's abject failure to exercise oversight or protect civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks, and now Hastert stands accused of improper sexual contact with a boy he knew years ago while teaching high school and trying to hide that sordid history by paying the young man to keep quiet. If federal prosecutors could meet the legal thresholds for charging and convicting Hastert of a sex crime, they would be fully justified in aggressively pursuing the matter.

Yet, as Conor Friedersdorf writes in The Atlantic, the Hastert indictment doesn’t charge him for, or even accuse him of, sexual misconduct. Rather, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Hastert was indicted for two alleged felonies: 1) withdrawing cash from his bank accounts in amounts and patterns designed to hide the payments; and 2) lying to the FBI about the purpose of those withdrawals once they detected them and then inquired with him.” It isn’t illegal to withdraw money from the bank, nor to compensate someone in recognition of past harms, nor to be the victim of a blackmail scheme. So why should it be a crime to hide those actions from the U.S. government? The current charges could be motivated by a desire to prosecute Hastert for sex crimes. But that dodges the issue. “In order to punish him for that crime, the government should charge him with it, then prosecute him with due process and convict him in front of a jury of his peers,” says Greenwald. “What over-criminalization does is allow the government to turn anyone it wants into a felon, and thus punish them without having to overcome those vital burdens. Regardless of one’s views of Hastert or his alleged misconduct here, it should take little effort to see why nobody should want that.”


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by tynin on Wednesday June 03 2015, @05:57PM

    by tynin (2013) on Wednesday June 03 2015, @05:57PM (#191698) Journal

    While I disagree it should be illegal, the practice is called Structuring [wikipedia.org], and is a tool the Feds use in going after money laundering (it is amazing how many things can be considered a form of money laundering, so much so you've likely done it yourself), as well as harass legit business owners who happen to routinely make deposits or withdraws just under the (completely arbitrary) value of $10,000 USD.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @06:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 03 2015, @06:47PM (#191718)

    Normally something like this happening to a member of the political class would get the law fixed. Like when Robert Bork's video rental records were published. [wikipedia.org] But they went after a pedo so the law is safe. Thank god!