If only we were as good as holding powerful members of the Executive's party to the law. If only it were as good at enforcing the law on well-connected major donors.
Still, it's not nothing to see a former Speaker of the House brought to heel for serious violations of the law.
He may have gotten his just deserts for the sex abuse, but I still object to the manner in which this matter got discovered. Means = end?
ReplyDeleteHastert was initially charged with structuring bank transactions. As I'm sure y'all know, banks are obligated to file with FinCEN "suspicious activity reports" to disclose any series of transactions that appear to be "structured" to avoid the =/> $10k reporting threshold. If you explore the Institute for Justice website, you'll see that totally innocent business people have undergone stressful and expensive confiscation of funds as a result of completely innocent and justifiable transactions. It's a law that was intended to trap criminals, but is subject to self-serving agency abuse similar to the civil asset forfeiture laws.
And now I see that the victim whom Hastert was paying off has sued him for the balance of what he claims he was promised. The victim was happy to be silent while he thought he was getting a payoff, but now, frankly, has lost any sympathy I might have had for him.
To my way of thinking, there are no "clean hands" in this mess: not Hastert, not the victim, not our legal system.
Fair enough. Somebody once said that it's too much to hope for justice. The best we can hope for is the occasional lapse in injustice.
ReplyDeleteThis guy says it better than I did, with facts even.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2016/04/the_troubling_prosecution_of_dennis_hastert.html