Dennis Hastert, Longest-Serving Republican House Speaker and Convicted Child Molester, Dies at 84
Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican Speaker of the House, who later pleaded guilty to bank fraud in a scheme to conceal sexual misconduct with minors, has died of natural causes at 84. He remains the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to serve prison time.
Dennis Hastert, the Illinois Republican who served as Speaker of the House from 1999 to 2007 and later became the highest-ranking U.S. official ever to serve prison time, died of natural causes over the weekend at the age of 84, according to multiple reports.
Hastert's death closes the book on one of the most dramatic falls from power in modern American political history. Once second in line to the presidency, Hastert was revealed in 2015 to have been paying hush money to conceal sexual abuse of teenage boys dating back to his years as a high school teacher and wrestling coach in Illinois during the 1960s and 1970s.
Federal banking regulators flagged a series of unusual cash withdrawals by Hastert in 2015, suspecting someone might be blackmailing the former Speaker. The investigation that followed uncovered that Hastert was paying to keep silent his sexual transgressions with minors. He was indicted on charges of lying to investigators and evading banking laws, and later pleaded guilty to the bank crimes. Prosecutors dropped a false-statements charge as part of the plea agreement.
At sentencing, U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin called Hastert «a serial child molester.» Hastert admitted in court that he had «mistreated athletes» and «took advantage» of those he was supposed to mentor. He was never charged with sex crimes because the statute of limitations had expired. He served 13 months of a 15-month sentence at a federal facility in Rochester, Minnesota.
Hastert's rise to the Speakership was itself something of an accident. He entered the leadership ranks in 1998 after Republicans nearly lost the House in that year's midterms and Speaker Newt Gingrich resigned. Hastert, a low-key former coach known to colleagues as «Coach» rather than «Mr. Speaker,» was seen as a consensus-builder who could steady a restive conference. He took the gavel in 1999 and held it longer than any other Republican in history.
His tenure was marked by relative obscurity until the final years, when scandal engulfed his leadership. In September 2006, as Republicans were fighting to keep their majority in the midterms, news broke that Rep. Mark Foley of Florida had sent inappropriate messages to high school-age male teens serving as House pages. Hastert, a former teacher and coach, faced immediate questions about why he had not done more to protect the pages.
At a press conference that fall, Hastert was asked about the Foley matter and offered only a mumbled non-answer, saying he was not «very happy» about the situation. The House page program was discontinued soon afterward. Democrats won the House handily in the 2006 midterms, and Hastert chose not to run for a leadership post in the new Congress. He remained a rank-and-file member for a few months before resigning in late 2007.
After leaving Congress, Hastert largely disappeared from public view, shunning interviews as he had during his Speakership. He rarely appeared in the Capitol corridors. His reticence, he once explained, was because he was more of a «listener.»
That carefully maintained obscurity ended in 2015 when the banking investigation exposed the secret he had kept for decades. The revelation stunned Washington and the public alike, as Hastert had been widely regarded as a bland, almost forgotten figure from a previous era of Republican politics.
Hastert's death at 84 brings a final chapter to a life that spanned from small-town Illinois classrooms to the pinnacle of American political power, and then to a federal prison cell. He is survived by his wife, Jean, and two sons. No public memorial plans have been announced.
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