Denny Hastert, the longest serving Speaker for the GOP, was sentenced to prison for structuring hush-money payments to former wrestlers he had molested when he was their coach.
During sentencing of Hastert in 2016 for his earlier shameful crimes, the judge decried Hastert operating as a “serial child molester.”
See “A man two heartbeats away from the presidency was a serial child molester” [ Vox, Apr 28, 2016].
Judge Durkin sentenced Hastert to 15 months in prison for the structured payoffs to the former wrestlers, after he apologized. “I wanted to apologize for the boys I mistreated when I was their coach," he said. "What I did was wrong and I regret it. They looked to me, and I took advantage of them."
The sentencing judge noted, "Nothing is more disturbing than having 'serial child molester' and 'speaker of the House' in the same sentence," [Judge Thomas] Durkin said upon sentencing Dennis Hastert.
— USA Today 04/27/2016
See Las Vegas Sun column from last week,
GOP still chained to decades-old ‘rule’
created by child molester
April 10, 2024
Repeatedly, House members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gaetz have held up the Hastert Rule as a line that Speakers should not cross.
When Speaker Johnson in March passed a fiscal year funding measure to prevent a government shutdown, MTG assailed him for “betrayal.” “This funding bill passed without the majority of the majority,” she railed.
MTG had first warned the last speaker Kevin McCarthy against advancing Ukraine funding last fall. As reported/tweeted by CNN reporter Manu Raju:
Manu Raju @mkraju
“He can’t do it, it would be a violation of the Hastert rule, which is a long held role by Republican majorities that the speaker cannot bring a bill to the floor.”
5:56 PM · Oct 2, 2023
Matt Gaetz pulled the trigger on Kevin McCarthy after a vote in September that had cleared $300 million of funding for Ukraine. McCarthy did not retain full party support after that to hold onto the Speakership. Gaetz set up the challenge to the then-Speaker on the House floor last October:
“Ukraine has lost the support of a majority of the majority. …. last week, 101 Republicans voted for it, 117 Republicans voted against it. According to the Hastert Rule, which Speaker McCarthy agreed to in January, you cannot use Democrats to roll a majority of the majority, certainly on something as consequential as Ukraine.” — Gaetz, Congressional Record Oct. 2, 2023 (PDF, pg 3)
This rule that constrains Speakers and shuns bipartisanship is corrupt, particularly for bills supporting shared defense goals and cross-alliance foreign policy.
MTG — as a surrogate for the political ambitions of Trump — has tripled down on the Ukraine funding issue, joining herself with the former president’s goal of starving Ukraine of its defenses against Russia, and imposing delays.
Republican party members won’t recognize that their would-be nominee for November is beholden, for some unclear reasons, to powers in Russia, and its president Putin.
Maybe it’s because he felt indebted, after an oligarch paid him double, $95 million during a real estate slump, for a Palm Beach Florida property he sold.
The oligarch who bought out Trump’s property later launched an electric battery energy storage firm in North Carolina (and got local tax relief for it); the firm attached the “Gridbank” battery stystem via Hagerstown, Maryland to a regional electrical transmission network, PJM Interconnect (map), that provides grid connectivity to 13 states and D.C. (The American portion of the battery firm eventually went bankrupt, and the European based company has since moved on to mobility-based batteries, for vehicles.) The best coverage of the oligarch-launched firm during the years after the Florida purchase of Trump’s property is covered by Wendy Siegelman here. See “Russian-linked battery company is embedding itself in the US energy sector” by Siegelman.
The earliest direct encounter of Trump with Russian territory, in Moscow and St. Peterburg/Leningrad, was during a 1987 trip with first wife, Ivana, scouting business prospects. On returning home, within 2 months, Trump purchased full-page ads in newspapers to urge the US to stop paying the “billions of dollars we are losing” to protect other nations under the US military umbrella.
That’s the decades-ago preview of the Trump’s evolving disdain for NATO.
Maybe the loyalty is in gratitude to a St. Petersburg troll farm that was run by Yevgeny Prigozhin (no longer alive), which published multitudes of Facebook impressions in the 2016 elections to boost candidate Trump and disparage his opponent, on Facebook and Twitter.
The 2016 campaign manager of the Trump campaign, Paul Manafort, and deputy campaign manager Rick Gates, met in August, 2016 in a NYC cigar lounge with a Russian intelligence operative Konstantin Kilimnik and shared internal polling data for targeting in key battleground states. [archived link]
After taking office in 2016, Trump seemed to undermine Ukraine’s attempt to defend itself from Russia, which was engaged in a long-grinding war against Ukraine’s eastern regions since 2014, years before the full-blown invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022. Though the Trump administration ostensibly sold anti-tank Javelin missiles to Kyiv, the US also forbade Ukraine from actually using them at the line of combat against Russia.
May 7, 2018 [UA Wire]
“The U.S. imposed restrictions on the use of Javelin anti-tank missile systems in the Donbas, which Washington supplied to Ukraine, as stated by Georgiy Tuka, the deputy minister for the temporarily occupied territories and internally displaced persons of Ukraine, on the Pryamoy channel.
“According to him, one of the terms of the contract to supply the missile systems was‘ not to use these complexes directly on the contact line.’
Of course, in obeyance to the next Leningradian candidate for president, Speaker Mike Johnson has so far jammed and slow-walked any eventual aid to Ukraine. Johnson has floated modifying and reworking the Senate-passed aid bill by extending funding to Kyiv only as a loan, with a possibility of a “waiver” of repayment,
Can you just imagine that next perfect phone call for such a loan waiver, demanding “I want you to do us a favor though.”
Johnson also mulls attaching Russian assets to supply the funds; however, most of those assets are retained in Europe, so seizing those would create long additional delays before the legal and financial hurdles are overcome.
The supplemental funding could be voted on by the House in one day — if only Johnson wasn’t pinned by the corrupt Hastert rule, and a captive presidential candidate.
By the time Republican leaders face up to the reality of the candidate they will nominate, if they delay, it may be much too late to keep Ukraine from being overrun and decimated by Russia. Russia has already taken over and occupied the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) in Ukraine — Europe’s largest sized nuclear plant, turned it into an armed base, and has planted mines around its perimeter.
The impasse in military aid that Speaker Johnson delays, an impasse tied to two former leaders with hush-money problems is dangerous, and it is also corrupt.
Does the Congress save Ukraine — or does it save Mike Johnson as Speaker?