Part Two: Dennis Hastert: The Longest-Serving Republican Speaker of the House

In part 2, Dennis Hastert lucks his way into becoming Speaker of the House and helps Congress redefine corruption for the 21st century. And then, after his retirement, it all comes crashing down. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:39Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast about the very worst people in all of history. And today we're talking about a guy who was both one of the worst people in all of history and the longest serving Republican speakers of the House. Speaker of the House. Speakers? I didn't need to pluralize that. Anyway, it's Denny Hastert.

• 1:56Speaker 04

  Denny.

• 1:57Robert Evans?

  Air horn, air horn, air horn. Well, I feel like he's a friend now, you know, Miles, Miles Gray.

• 2:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:02Robert Evans?

  Beautiful guest. Like, we know him now, we're close.

• 2:05Speaker 04

  I mean, I was, I was saying Denny from the beginning.

• 2:08Robert Evans?

  You were, you did immediately start calling him Denny.

• 2:10Speaker 04

  Very informal with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  I think I just heard his name too much ambiently in the news.

• 2:15Robert Evans?

  You're informal, it's the lobbyist, Denny. You just immediately start going up to Denny.

• 2:18Speaker 04

  Look at Denny Hastert, dude. Just saw that old son of a bitch on K Street.

• 2:22Robert Evans?

  You want $200,000 to do something fucked up, Denny?

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Ah, Miles, Miles Gray, of the Daily Zeitgeist and now multiple other podcasts. Yes.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do a few other things. I'm talking about 90 Day Fiance or soccer or geopolitics or, you know, fucking Kelly Clarkson, who knows?

• 2:45Robert Evans?

  Kelly Clarkson, one of the most important topics in geopolitics.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  We do it all, we do it all on all these shows.

• 2:50Speaker 05

  She was trending this, this last week over like.

• 2:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I, I don't approve of what she did in Indonesia. You know, the death toll is just completely unforgivable, but you know, that's, that's being a star.

• 3:02Speaker 04

  And using experimental weapons like that is, I think I'd heard of, yeah.

• 3:06Robert Evans?

  Just unacceptable. Anyway, let's, let's move away from that dark topic and to the happier topic of Dennis Hastert, who, when we last left off our show, he had continually, it's not even like he's failing upwards, it's just like, there's a job and he's standing in the room when the previous guy dies?

• 3:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:24Robert Evans?

  Right? Like, that's his thing. Oh, yeah, that guy just got sick.

• 3:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. He just knows to be like in the vicinity of the thing he wants.

• 3:32Robert Evans?

  There's a lesson for you all, kids. If you want to do something and it's like a real long shot career, just put yourself as physically close to the people who make those decisions as possible and that's your best shot at getting in.

• 3:44Speaker 04

  Very high chance someone goes, hey, you, yeah, yeah, you want to do this? Me? Yeah, great. All right. You're Speaker of the House, because Newt Gingrich doesn't want to do it.

• 3:54Robert Evans?

  Gingrich can't anymore. It's a little more complicated than that, though. We'll talk about that.

• 3:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:06Robert Evans?

  From 1987 to almost the end of the George W. Bush administration, Dennis Hastert represented Illinois's 14th district in the House of Representatives. At the time he took office, his primary asset was 104 acre farm in southern Illinois owned by his wife. It was valued at something less than $100,000. By all accounts, he does not seem to have been a man of wealth when he took office. By the time he leaves 20 years later, he will be a rich man. I've heard estimates of his net worth at around $10 million. We don't know, but it was significant and well out of line with what he might have been expected to earn simply by diligent saving and investing of his salary. That doesn't mean that his congressional salary was inadequate.

• 4:48Robert Evans?

  He went from making like $20,000 a year teaching to earning 180,000 a year in Congress. His first years in office were spent, in the words of one journalist, off stage. He was a minor player who was expected to fall in line and do what the more experienced Republicans in the House told him to do. Right? That's kind of how politics works at this level. There's some evidence that he started living beyond his means as soon as he moved to DC and started making more money. In September of 1992, before the election that would turn William Jefferson Clinton from yet another Arkansas pervert to the President of the United States, Hastert found himself embroiled in his first scandal. The House banking scandal was a huge deal at the time, even though everyone's forgotten it now, right? But it was like a big deal in the early 90s.

• 5:34Robert Evans?

  The gist of what happened is that there was a period of time in which the House had a bank, right? And the, the House would allow members, people who served in the House to overdraw their checking accounts without suffering penalties from the House bank, as long as the amount they overdraw it from was less than their upcoming salary. Right? Now, the House Bank was called the House Bank, but it wasn't a bank in like the legal, like the sense that you and I know, like, we all have a bank. The House Bank is instead a clearinghouse and a clearinghouse is a financial edifice created to allow for the facilitation of various transactions and transfers. I don't understand much of the difference, other than that, there's a lot less regulation around the kind of bank the House Bank is than a regular bank, which is why this happens.

• 6:18Robert Evans?

  The whole story of the House banking scandal is more complicated than I can do justice to in an aside. I do enjoy, they call it rubber gate because a bunch of bounced checks, right? Which I think is kind of, kind of cute. That, that's fun. That's good. That's a good time.

• 6:30Speaker 04

  That's quaint.

• 6:31Robert Evans?

  That's good. That's enjoyable. Yeah.

• 6:32Speaker 04

  I miss, I long for a scandal like that.

• 6:34Robert Evans?

  I know, I know. Just a humble gate. Yeah, rubber gate, cute. Yeah. Basically, this is a huge check kiting scandal that involves, to some degree, it involves roughly 450 representatives, current and past. Now, most of these guys did not commit crimes, probably. They certainly don't get convicted of them, but what happens is that these guys realize they can overdraw their counts, accounts as often as they want if the overdraft doesn't exceed their next paycheck. And so they do fucking constantly. Hastert is one of the implicated representatives. During the time, it was like a two year period they're monitoring, he's found to have overdrawn his account 44 times.

• 7:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  What?

• 7:15Robert Evans?

  It's like a couple of years. No, it's like, it's like two or three, I think. I, I, I don't know the exact.

• 7:19Speaker 04

  It's like every other fucking week?

• 7:21Robert Evans?

  It's like every week, basically, that he could, pretty much.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  I don't got it. Yeah, whatever, just overdraw, yeah, fine.

• 7:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, overdraw, fuck it. Like most of the 450 reps who got drawn into this thing, he was cleared of any criminal wrongdoing, but several people were convicted of criminal behavior, including, I just bring this guy up because I love his name, former Representative Buzz Luckins, Republican from Ohio. Buzz Luckins? Or Luckins, it's L U K E N S. Yeah, Buzz Luckins. I love that name. He was a Republican from Ohio who got got on bribery and conspiracy charges. Now, this isn't relevant because it shows Hastert doing anything unethical. He seems to be doing the same thing every other representative does, but it does kind of suggest that he was running up against the limits of his new income almost immediately. Like, he's making 10 times as much and he is, he is paycheck to paycheck, pretty much immediately.

• 8:12Robert Evans?

  Dennis is great.

• 8:13Speaker 04

  I just, I just Googled Buzz Luckins and you'll never guess what kind of stuff he's into.

• 8:19Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah? What's Buzz Luckins into? I should have looked him up.

• 8:21Speaker 04

  Very, no, also much, he's, he's also a pedophile.

• 8:27Robert Evans?

  Oh, oh, really?

• 8:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:29Robert Evans?

  Oh, Buzz, oh, Buzz.

• 8:31Speaker 04

  Convicted in May of 1989.

• 8:34Robert Evans?

  So he'd been convicted before he gets in trouble for the check thing, too? That's, that's.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, somehow, yeah, yeah.

• 8:40Robert Evans?

  Ah, Buzz, that's, that's, that's, I mean.

• 8:43Speaker 04

  The Republicans tried to get him to resign and he refused.

• 8:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah, well, this will not be the last Republican who gets in trouble for something like that, and I'm not even counting Dennis in this story. So Dennis's greatest skill in national politics was finding more prominent and powerful men and convincing them to take him under his wing. He was first protege to the House Minority Leader, Robert Michel. Michel, who died in 2017, looked just like Dick Cheney. It's like crazy. It's, it's M I C H E L. Like, if you look up Robert, like, Michael or Mitchell, he looks so much like Cheney. It's weird. The year he and Hastert met, he wound up in a scandal for admitting that he'd enjoyed minstrel shows in blackface as a child and missed them. He also considered removing racial slurs from popular old songs to be on par with the

• 9:30Robert Evans?

  Soviet Union airbrushing actual human beings out of history.

• 9:35Robert Evans?

  So, great guy to have as your mentor, Denny.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  Holy shit, what?

• 9:39Robert Evans?

  What a cool dude.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  It's crazy, this look of like evil conservative bastard. It's just like, it's just like a spirit that just goes, it's just like a genetic code or something. It's like, yeah, we all kind of look like Dick Cheney.

• 9:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. It's, it's like carsonalization, but for like Republican members of Congress.

• 9:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 9:58Robert Evans?

  They're all returning to Cheney?

• 9:59Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 10:02Robert Evans?

  So, Michael, despite everything I just said, all the racism, Mitchell was known, or Michael was known, as a respectable, even beloved bipartisan. One of the better Republicans of his day to work with if you were a Democrat, right? That's what people say about this guy. When the 1990s kicked off and Clinton upset Republican plans for a second Bush senior term, Newt Gingrich and a bunch of, a group of new far-right firebrands in Congress pilloried Mitchell for failing to fight for Republican goals hard enough and for playing golf and cards with Democrats. The reality is that Mitchell's voting record was almost identical to Gingrich's. But that doesn't matter, right? The facts are not important here. It's that, like, he wasn't like a dick to them. And honestly, like, Mitchell would be like, well, but like, by golfing and like, hanging out with them, I'm able to get stuff done, including,

• 10:47Robert Evans?

  like, push conservative politi-- like, that's how it works? And Gingrich is like, no, you can only be an asshole.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  Right. We're changing things.

• 10:54Speaker 05

  Sounds like old Newt.

• 10:56Robert Evans?

  Old nudie Newt. In the 1994 midterms, Mitchell opted not to run for reelection. He wound up leaving just before his party took back the House for the first time in his political career. We'll discuss that shortly. But by the time this happened, Hastert had already cozied up to his next round of mentors. These would include Newt Gingrich and, most importantly, Tom Delay. A ta-- old Tom Delay. We don't talk about him much anymore either.

• 11:22Speaker 04

  It's been too long. It's been too long.

• 11:24Robert Evans?

  A lot of guys we don't talk about because of the scandals from this era of Republican politics. Uh, Tom Delay was a Texan born in Laredo, which, if you haven't been, is easily in the bottom 20% of the towns in Texas. Tom grew up in Venezuela because his dad was an oil man. He went to college in Baylor, even though, although he was expelled after two years from his pre-med program for drinking and defacing Texas A&M University, which should not be a crime. I'm gonna stand up for this one thing Tom Delay did. That should be legal.

• 11:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:55Robert Evans?

  As a result of his hawkish policies and hard-nosed attitude, Tom acquired the nickname "The Hammer." Like Hastert, The Hammer failed to volunteer for Vietnam. The Washington Post reported that he received draft deferments and ultimately avoided service during the 1969 lottery. There's nothing wrong with this for someone who didn't constantly demand the US military kill people overseas because it sounded cool and who called Democrats-- he's going in the bushes to call Democrats like cowards for being chickens and not wanting to go to war. There's a good article in Salon on this whole trend of like, these Republican warhawks who absolutely did everything they could to avoid fighting in Vietnam. And it discusses something Delay would have done right about, around the time he and Hastert first met, right? Quote, "At the Republican Convention in 1988, he, Delay, explained

• 12:40Robert Evans?

  to reporters that there had been no space in the Army for patriotic folks like himself and Dan Quayle during the Vietnam War, because too many minority youths had joined the service to earn money and escape the ghetto." I would have fought in Vietnam, but these d-- these darned, poor, black kids kept volunteering ahead of me. That is nuts. First off, Tom, they would have found a place for you.

• 13:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. Wild. And even trying to, like, cede that sort of, like, white supremacy as a reason for why you didn't go kill brown people, too? Like--

• 13:15Robert Evans?

  Holy shit. I had not heard that, and wow. That is, that's vile.

• 13:23Speaker 04

  Unreal, man. It sounds like some shit, like, if we heard it now, you'd like, laugh at? Or, but now, like, but back then, people were like, oh, I see. Okay. So that's why he didn't do that. Wow.

• 13:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. Makes sense, Tom.

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Because, you know, they're all trying to get their, you know, Dodge Chargers and stuff now with their enlistment payment. Ah, yeah, it is. I would have gone. I would have gone.

• 13:45Robert Evans?

  That's why I didn't join the Army, is I don't want a Dodge Charger. So, during the 1994 election, during the 1994 election season, Tom Delay and Dennis Hastert partnered up, with Denny as the junior partner, to support another rep, Ed Madigan, to be the Republican whip instead of Gingrich. The whip is, his job is like, to whip votes, right? Like, it's a, you're working for the Speaker to, like, get your votes in line to make shit happen, right?

• 14:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:09Robert Evans?

  However, as I noted, that election went way better than expected. And Gingrich became not the whip, but the Speaker of the House, right? So, they're, Delay and Hastert are working to get this other guy elected the whip. Gingrich wins, but then he can't take the job because the election goes crazy good and Gingrich becomes the Speaker of the House. And to talk about this, because this is a really important moment in American history that I think people who are, like, born in the late 90s or kind of later don't always know. So I'm gonna quote from an article in history.com. "Led by Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia, who subsequently replaced Democrat Tom Foley of Washington as Speaker of the House, the empowered GOP united under the Contract with America, a 10-point legislative plan to reduce federal taxes and dismantle social welfare programs established during

• 14:52Robert Evans?

  six decades of mostly Democratic rule in Congress. Gingrich's House of Representatives, home to the majority of the Republican freshmen, led the Republican Revolution by passing every bill incorporated in the Contract with America, with the exception of a term-limits constitutional amendment within the first 100 days of the 104th Congress." So, that, called this the Republican Revolution for a reason. The Republicans take the House for the first time in a while and then pass an insane amount of bills, just absolutely gutting the welfare state. Um, and that's not the only thing it does, right? But that's the Contract with America. This unprecedented blast of Republican legislation was forced through with the help of Delay and Hastert. Because Gingrich was Speaker, he needed a

• 15:35Robert Evans?

  new whip. Um, and Delay ran for the job against Gingrich. Gingrich had another guy, his favorite appointee, that he wanted to be his whip. But Tom Delay wins, and Hastert runs Tom Delay's campaign. And so, they wind up, Delay winds up the whip, and he makes his friend Denny the deputy whip. And together, the two built what the Washington Post called, in a contemporary article, quote, "A vote-counting operation that is the envy of other Republicans who once had hopes of climbing the ladder role." In other words, they're very good at whipping votes in line to pass this Contract with America. So they do it, play a major role in why the Republicans are so legislatively successful pushing this contract, right? Hastert has a front-row seat to that. Interviews with Republican representatives about this period of time always emphasize that they

• 16:20Robert Evans?

  would call Dennis Coach. They, he gets called Coach by his coworkers in Congress. They don't, oh, boy.

• 16:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, they only know. Or maybe they did.

• 16:29Robert Evans?

  Most people, yeah. And in a lot of these interviews at the time, they'll suggest that the skills he developed as a wrestling coach were what made him such a good whip, right? He's really good at finding what motivates different representatives and finding ways to, like, promise them. He's also good at, like, strong-arming people into voting without making them feel like he strong-armed them, right? And again, that's, they call him Coach. Yeah, it's gross. Uh, many of these quotes and lines from articles are unintentionally cringey today, knowing what we know now. Here's an example from that Washington Post article. "On Capitol Hill, Hastert lumbers down the marble hallways like a woolly bear, draping his beefy arm over the shoulder of a colleague as he tries to secure another vote for the piece of legislation of the day. 'He was always in the shadows, but he was

• 17:12Robert Evans?

  always doing things,' recalled former Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dan Rostenkowski." He was always in the shadows, but he was always doing things. The Dennis Hastert story?

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Jesus.

• 17:24Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  To put it lightly.

• 17:27Robert Evans?

  Oh, boy, Dan. You accidentally hit the nail on the fucking head there.

• 17:32Speaker 04

  You know him. He's always in the shadows. He's one of those creepy shadow guys doing stuff.

• 17:37Robert Evans?

  Putting his arm around people, just grabbing. He loved to grab people from the shadows. Great shadow grabber. Yeah. Really good at grabbing people by surprise from the darkness. It's an important skill in a deputy whip.

• 17:49Speaker 04

  All right, yeah. We were doing some prelatives for House members. He got best jump scare from the shadows grabbing and scaring the shit out of you. Dennis Hastert, come on up, get your award, man.

• 17:59Robert Evans?

  Get you, get on up here, Denny.

• 18:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:01Robert Evans?

  Speaking of people who deserve awards, Miles, you know who deserves all the awards we can give them?

• 18:07Speaker 05

  Sophie?

• 18:07Robert Evans?

  Our sponsors.

• 18:08Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 18:09Robert Evans?

  Oh, no. Sophie, I support our sponsors egotting first, you know? I think they could. I think they've got a chance. They got that dog in them.

• 18:17Speaker 05

  That's an interesting thing to say to your business partner.

• 18:26Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Sophie, look, my business partner isn't just you, it's the products and services that support this podcast.

• 18:34Speaker 04

  Don't forget Christ.

• 18:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and Christ, of course, of course.

• 18:38Speaker 04

  First of all, gotta give it up to my business partner, Jesus Christ, you know?

• 18:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, but who are you gonna call, who are you gonna call on emergency?

• 18:44Robert Evans?

  I mean--

• 18:45Speaker 05

  I set myself up for that.

• 18:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  But you, but yeah, that's true. You. 10 times out of 10, Sophie. If it's a ghost, though, Ghostbusters.

• 18:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, definitely, definitely. Definitely not, uh, actually, you know what? If Dennis Hastert's ghost starts haunting me after this, I will call, not, not the Ghostbusters, but probably like, the Ghost, like, whoever catches ghost pedophiles. I don't know. I don't know whose job that is.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  The ghosts from, uh, from, from the Return of the King, from Lord of the Rings.

• 19:12Robert Evans?

  Sure. Yeah, they, they seem like they don't like pedophiles. Yeah, I bet they'd help.

• 19:15Speaker 05

  I mean, I think they were, I think they were pedophiles, but they were ghosts with, they were ghosts to swords.

• 19:20Robert Evans?

  I don't know that that's established by Tolkien.

• 19:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:24Robert Evans?

  Because Hastert had played a role in helping Gingrich pass the many bills included in the Contract with America, it's worth looking at what that contract included and its consequences. A write-up by Phil Harvey in Prospect from 1995 notes that the contract only called for cuts in two specific areas: aid to families with dependent children and the crime prevention parts of the 94 anti-crime bill. Per Prospect, quote, "At the same time, the contract promises a variety of new social benefits in the form of tax breaks. These include tax incentives for adoption and for the purchase of long-term care insurance, an elderly-dependent tax credit, a $500 per child general tax credit, and an increase in the amount of earned income retirees may receive without any reduction in their

• 20:06Robert Evans?

  social security payments, and a cut in taxes on social security payments for the elderly with incomes over $34,000, for singles, and $44,000 for couples." Now, that should make it clear who this contract is really with, right? Middle class, and particularly, like, elderly and soon-to-be elderly, middle-class Republican voters, right? You are cutting aid to the poorest people in this country, and you are giving aid in the form of tax breaks and credits and whatnot to, like, your voters, right? That's the Contract with America, right?

• 20:34Speaker 04

  The contract is, I'll give you money and you vote for me.

• 20:36Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's more direct now with the person just promising people five grand, but it's always kind of been how it works. As Harvey noted in his article, "Cutting welfare and using that money to create new middle-class entitlements isn't really about fiscal responsibility." Quote, "Deficit reduction may provide a cover for the cuts, but the immediate effect is regressive redistribution of income." Now Harvey absolutely called what was happening at the time. He referred to the Contract with America as Gingrich's time bomb and termed the new era it inaugurated in US politics as the great rollback. Quote, "The Republican attack on the safety net comes primarily from their welfare reform bill dubbed the Personal Responsibility Act of 1995. The bill would effectively return the United States to 19th century policies toward the

• 21:21Robert Evans?

  poor and public assistance, complete with orphanages and even indoor relief." And so you can, there's a lot that you can kind of trace, cause not everything passes, obviously, but like, most of it does. And you can trace a lot of the things that are wrong in this country today to the Contract with America, right? To like, rolling back help for people who are the poorest and most desperate and subsidizing the people the Republicans thought were most likely to vote for them.

• 21:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 21:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I just, it's, it's, this is where a lot of it starts.

• 21:50Speaker 04

  Well, and on top of that, like, that formula of cutting out social safety nets, they, they know what the knock on effect is, which is like more instability, more chaos, crime, and then you're also the people invested in the military industrial complex or prison industrial complex.

• 22:06Robert Evans?

  Not cutting money to that.

• 22:07Speaker 04

  We're making money on both sides. Like, we're, we're already cutting programs that's gonna create more money for us to siphon up. And on top of that, when they're, these people are left destitute with no recourse and are committing crime or whatever.

• 22:19Robert Evans?

  Lock them up.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  Now, we also profit off of that part, too. So it's, it just, it works out, uh, either way.

• 22:23Robert Evans?

  It works out for them. Great, yeah. No matter what, they, they play both sides, so they always come out on top.

• 22:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, right.

• 22:28Robert Evans?

  So, as Hastert moved up in Republican politics and helped influence the course of the nation, he spent his newfound money on a bunch of classic cars. He insisted to the Tribune that he didn't see these as an investment, but as a way to recapture moments from his past, presumably moments like abusing his students in the shower room. During the years where he still drove himself, his cars could be recognized by their many vanity plates, including Kong 14, USHR 14, and CD Whip 2. Just a lot of vanity plates that are just your job title.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  Wait, what was the first one?

• 23:01Robert Evans?

  Kong 14, like, the Congress 14th District in Illinois. You couldn't include Illinois in there, right? But it's an Illinois plate, I assume.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  In my mind, I'm like, King, the 14th King Kong movie?

• 23:11Robert Evans?

  No, no, no, no, no. And then USHR, US House of Representatives 14, and then CD Whip 2, that he's the Deputy Whip, Congress Deputy Whip 2, I guess. So, that Tribune profile notes that the Hasterts quickly abandoned any plans to become a Washington couple. Jean would remain in Illinois, where she continued to teach PE in the same school that her husband had hunted boys in. As Denny's career built momentum, Jean told a journalist that she started to wonder if she shouldn't move to DC. Quote, "This is probably a lot more important than I thought it was, but if it is, don't tell me." It's, the way she always phrases stuff is really interesting to me. Like, I wonder if she knew, in order to keep the gravy going, she needed to not know much about her husband's day to day activities.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  I have a feeling you're with, if you're married to them, you're probably interacting with them enough that you're gleaning something, yeah, you probably have an idea, yeah. He doesn't also seem to be too slick about it, anyway.

• 24:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's the other thing, is like, I don't think he's super good at hiding what he's doing. Um, so, yeah, my, my assumption is that Dennis encouraged his wife to stay home because he had some extracurricular activities. Hopefully, these ones were consensual, that he wanted to engage in, in DC, without getting caught, but that's entirely supposition. I don't have evidence of that. It's just kinda weird, when you read some of the stuff she said about like, why she wasn't in DC. During the 19, sorry, were you gonna say something, Miles?

• 24:34Speaker 04

  No, no, and I think it's just like, the nature of their relationship, too. It sounds like, for someone who is a predator like that, you don't want the person who kinda knows you well to be

• 24:45Robert Evans?

  That close?

• 24:46Speaker 04

  In the environment where you're operating like that.

• 24:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 04

  Just like with the sports thing, she's like, when it's wrestling season, I don't know, he's out of the house.

• 24:54Robert Evans?

  He seems different. He's a different guy. Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I'm sure, like, for him, this is some form of that, like, whether, it might not be the same thing, but like, clearly, he's, that part of his brain is active when he's weaning and dealing in Congress, and

• 25:07Robert Evans?

  That, that's kinda what I suspect, yeah.

• 25:11Robert Evans?

  During the 1990s, Dennis Hastert voted to, among other things, require Puerto Rican citizens to learn English if Puerto Rico became a state. He voted to abolish the tax code. Not all this stuff passes, obviously. Uh, he also supported a Republican bill to ban the US from taking part in a conservation program that right wing conspiracists, including, I think, Alex Jones, had deemed the Black Helicopter Bill, because they thought it would lead to the UN taking over American soil. This is one of like, those early, those first, like, gasps of the conspiratorial right actually getting like, recognition from the political right?

• 25:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:42Robert Evans?

  In a, in the modern era, yeah, so, he's, he's a piece of that. So he had no problem signaling to the fever swamps, and he clearly saw those voters as his people. But like his former mentor, Mitchell, he was also known for being a respected bipartisan. As Doug Booth, a former Hastert aide, told the Tribune, quote, "When it comes down to the nitty gritty of getting a bill done, Dennis Hastert says, 'I'll take 75% now and I'll come back next year and get the other 25%. You have a lot of people who are all or nothing. Denny is more concerned with getting things done.'" Right? That's, that's, that's what being a bipartisan is, right? Is only taking 75% of what you need upfront. Um, but he is like, I mean, unfortunately, objectively, he is like, more reasonable

• 26:26Robert Evans?

  about shit than a lot of modern Republicans are, as a, a guy in Congress, too. But he's also, this is, as we'll talk about, he's, he's a big part of why partisanship gets so bad, and so is Gingrich, right? Gingrich is really, when that process accelerates for the Republican Party of like, no, the Democrats are completely illegitimate, fuck them and everything they try to do, right? Once political action committees become a thing, Denny jumped on board immediately. By 1999, his head accrued more than $100,000 in donations in just three years. It's not a lot by today's money, but it was a lot for back then. It was described by a reporter as booming, with lobbyists trying to gain his favor. The Gingrich Speaker years were a chaotic time for Republicans in the House.

• 27:08Robert Evans?

  The swift and startling exercise of so much power brewed up a reaction. Newt Gingrich literally installed a life-size replica of a Tyrannosaurus Rex skull in his office to like, intimidate people. That was one of like, the decor decision, decisions he made?

• 27:24Robert Evans?

  I think Hastert puts in like, bird statues or something normal, actually. Um, but during Gingrich's time in power, he keep, Hastert kept his mouth shut and racked up committee positions. Chairman of House Government Reform, Chairman of Criminal Justice, the Speaker Steering Committee on Health. He became known as the Republican expert on healthcare. Not for any good reason, but because he was one of the people calling the shots. His old bio on the website of his former lobbying firm, Dickstein Shapiro, characterized his impact this way on healthcare. "He helped author the healthcare reform bill, which was signed into law by President Clinton in 1996 to expand coverage to the uninsured, and chaired the House Working Group on Healthcare Quality, which ultimately authored the Patient Protection Act.

• 28:05Robert Evans?

  That legislation, which passed the House on January 24th, 1998, expanded Americans' choices and access to affordable, high-quality healthcare."

• 28:13Speaker 05

  Sorry, I had, I had to look this up. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I had to look this up. Uh, wow.

• 28:22Speaker 04

  It's taking up, it takes up way too much fucking space to have a fucking stupid ass.

• 28:26Speaker 05

  It's so much bigger than I thought it would be.

• 28:28Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, the T-Rex skull? Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 28:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, sorry.

• 28:31Robert Evans?

  It's good stuff. No, it's like a full-sized replica, it's nuts. He's just got that, which honestly, I would do too, if I were the Speaker of the House, but because I like dinosaurs, not to intimidate people, just because dinosaurs are cool.

• 28:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, for normal reasons.

• 28:46Speaker 04

  Or go like, go harder. If you wanna intimidate him, like, hang that shit above the chair they sit in, or something.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  You know what I mean?

• 28:53Speaker 05

  It's like, it's not giving Game of Thrones, it's giving weird.

• 28:57Robert Evans?

  No, no, there is a fun Hastert quote where he's like, "I just don't think a dinosaur skull is the right symbol for the Republican Party."

• 29:05Robert Evans?

  When you're right, you're right, Denny. That's probably a bad call.

• 29:09Speaker 04

  Broken clock.

• 29:10Robert Evans?

  So, there's substantial debate about how true everything his bio said, like, what he said, like, those claims about his role in all this healthcare stuff is, and how well those programs and laws worked, and how much credit Hastert deserves for them. There's a lot of evidence that shows he saw himself primarily as representing the insurance industry. I found a great article from the website Modern Healthcare from back in 1999. They report on a breakfast Hastert attended while trying to push through HMO reform. Consider the recent spectacle of House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert at a $1,000 a plate breakfast fundraiser led by health insurance lobbyists. This breakfast at Denny's was held on the eve of the House vote on patient protection legislation. He picked up $15,000 for his political war chest and a large amount of egg, most of it on its face.

• 29:54Robert Evans?

  The GOP PAC-backed bill, with its softer legal approach, turned into burnt toast. The defeat was helped, one has to think, by news coverage of Hastert's morning meal. So, again, he's like, the Republican who gets to say shit about healthcare, he's primarily talking to insurance companies, and at times, it bites him and the Republican agenda in the ass, because he gets caught going to his bribery breakfast, right before a bill on HMO reform.

• 30:19Robert Evans?

  Cool guy, nice dude.

• 30:20Speaker 04

  What year was that?

• 30:21Robert Evans?

  That would've been 99. Yeah.

• 30:24Speaker 04

  Okay, so like, yeah, I mean, like, at this point, I mean, the machine's fully rocking with like, the K Street Project, and like, Tom DeLay and them being like, "Look, if you're, if you're lobbying, if we see you give a single dollar to Democrats, we won't even fucking talk to you." Which was, which was happening behind the scenes in this, during this period, too.

• 30:42Robert Evans?

  And Hastert's really involved in that. He is Tom DeLay's right-hand man, right?

• 30:47Speaker 04

  I mean, like, when that happened in 94, like, when they took the House, like, Tom DeLay called all these lobbyists, like, into the office to be like, "Just so you know, dude, we're gonna start keeping track of who you're giving money to, and you better remember who's in charge, it's us."

• 30:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you better remember who the boss is right now.

• 31:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:03Robert Evans?

  In 1998, Gingrich's Republican Revolution proved to be somewhat shorter-lived than he had hoped. The midterms went badly for his party, and he had to step down as Speaker because he had directly promised the midterms would not go badly for his party. His replacement was, originally, meant to be a, a House Representative named Robert Livingston. Now, the 500-pound gorilla in the room, with late 90s politics, and we haven't talked about this yet, is Bill Clinton's sex scandal, which broke in January of 1998. The House voted to impeach Clinton and adopted two articles of impeachment. The Senate would open a trial in 1999, and as we all know now, Clinton was not forced out of office. But the Republican Party nearly universally adopted the line that he ought to, that like, if he's not

• 31:48Robert Evans?

  Forced out that he needs to resign because what he did was so bad. And Robert Livingston is one of the congressmen who's like Clinton has to resign. Like it's he can't absolutely can't stay in office. What he's done is unforgivable. In December of 1998, before he could take office as Speaker, the news broke that Robert Livingston had had several adulterous affairs. Oh, while loudly insisting President Clinton needed to resign for his own. Now, to his credit, once he gets caught, Livingston steps down as Speaker and resigns. And he asked Clinton, follow me, you know, Bill, I'm resigning because what I did was so bad. You should do the same. And I love Bill Clinton's response is like, no, I don't think we should be just destroying people's careers like that.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  Yeah. Nah, I'm good fam.

• 32:31Robert Evans?

  I don't think you should have resigned, actually.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 32:34Robert Evans?

  And then he just stays and just sits.

• 32:36Speaker 04

  Wouldn't be me.

• 32:36Robert Evans?

  I mean, look, he sucks, but it's funny. It's a funny moment in politics.

• 32:40Speaker 04

  Especially with like that such faux moral outrage and trying to act like you have the high ground. When it's just purely just done performatively.

• 32:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, you got caught. You were perfectly happy to do this before you got caught. The truth is that many of the elected Republicans who went after Bill Clinton most loudly for his affair were either having active affairs, had had active affairs before, or would later have active affairs. Newt Gingrich, who was one of the loudest guys telling Clinton to resign, also was a constantly cheating on his wives. Per an article in the New Republic, Gingrich's litany of infidelities has been widely reported. As has his habit of leaving wives for mistresses of the affair that he carried out with a volunteer during his first campaign in 1974. One of his aides said, we'd have won in 1974 if we could have kept him out of the office, screwing her on the desk. But that hasn't stopped him from claiming positions of moral loftiness.

• 33:31Speaker 05

  In front of the T-Rex?

• 33:33Robert Evans?

  In front of the T-Rex. No, this would have been in 74. He didn't have a T-Rex then, Sophie.

• 33:37Speaker 04

  This is pre, pre Rex.

• 33:38Speaker 05

  Oh, sorry.

• 33:39Robert Evans?

  But that, but that hasn't stopped him from claiming positions of moral loftiness, decrying the impending downfall of our society, and penning books arguing, there is no attack on American culture more deadly and more historically dishonest than the secular effort to drive God out of America's public life.

• 33:54Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  Shut the fuck up.

• 33:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, sure, but yeah. How does God feel about you constantly dumping your wives for your mistresses? Like repeatedly fucking her on the desk so often it costs you an election?

• 34:06Speaker 04

  Well, the other thing too is that the, like Calista, his late, his, I think, current wife, he was also having an affair with her while he was talking about Bill Clinton in the.

• 34:17Robert Evans?

  He sure was, yeah.

• 34:18Speaker 04

  So it's just like, that whole time, he was like, oh yeah, I'm having sex with this staffer who's like 20 years younger than me.

• 34:24Robert Evans?

  He's, what Bill Clinton did was bad. And I think in a just society, you would have to stop being the president after something like that.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:30Robert Evans?

  But not when the people coming after you are the, like, the people, like, literally the people whose job it was to prosecute him are the one group of people who do not have any moral claim to condemn him, right? Where it's like, yeah, Newt Gingrich fucking Robert Livingston, Dennis Hastert, right? You have no reason, like, you guys don't get to go after him for this.

• 34:50Speaker 04

  We can all get lumped in, in the pieces of shit category, but there's levels to this and.

• 34:55Robert Evans?

  No, I'm sorry. You are all the same kind of guy. Um, so by this point, the fact, because, you know, Gingrich has collapsed spectacularly. He can't be the Speaker anymore because he's fucking like flamed out. And now Livingston has had just this absolute scandal explode in everyone's face. The Republican Party is not doing so hot, right? At the end of 1998, they are kind of in damage control mode and they need a new pick for Speaker. And it's gotta be someone safe and controversy free. Tom Delay was considered at first, but I soon began to drift towards Denny Hastert. I think because everyone knew Tom Delay was way too fucking corrupt.

• 35:38Robert Evans?

  Uh, I want to quote again from the Washington Post. Hastert emerged as a consensus choice for Speaker because of what and who he is not. There is not a breadth of scandal associated with Denny, said Brad Goodrich, Deputy Executive Director of the Illinois GOP, referring to the marital infidelity that drove Livingston from the speakership before he even formally accepted it. Just to be sure, Representative Donald Manzullo asked Hastert Saturday the question on many lawmakers' minds. I looked him right in the face and said, can you withstand the scrutiny? Recalled Manzullo, one of the social conservatives who regarded Livingston as severely tarnished. He said, yes. No scandal with old Denny Hastert.

• 36:13Speaker 04

  No.

• 36:14Robert Evans?

  Scandal free.

• 36:14Speaker 04

  Are you sure? Yeah, absolutely. Let's go.

• 36:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, why not?

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Give me the gavel, man. I'm ready.

• 36:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 04

  Nothing to hide.

• 36:22Robert Evans?

  No, I never did anything to a high school student.

• 36:25Speaker 04

  Dude, me, Dennis Hastert, the guy who's always lurking in the shadows? Come on, bro.

• 36:29Robert Evans?

  Shadow guy?

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Nah, nah, nah.

• 36:31Robert Evans?

  Shadow guy?

• 36:32Speaker 04

  Definitely not, definitely not.

• 36:33Robert Evans?

  Coach grabs people from the shadows?

• 36:36Speaker 04

  I'm your guy, dude. I'm your fucking guy, man. Let's just, let's just, let's just get it over with.

• 36:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So there were worries at the time that Hastert's low key nature and relatively short tenure and because he, you know, he's been in the Congress a while at this point, but not long in like Congress terms, right?

• 36:53Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 36:53Robert Evans?

  That this would cause a stature gap, right? That would harm his efficacy. Basically, no one's gonna like, listen to him as Speaker or take him seriously because he's too new. And he's just not like a very powerful guy, right? To an extent, obviously, like, the, the partnerships you make, you know, your, your history in Congress, the time you've been in there all contribute to like how powerful you are, you know, next to another representative. But a lot of it's just like chutzpah too, right? Like your, your attitude, like, are you a controlling person who is able to like get other people to follow you? And Hastert was seen as kind of weak, right? That was sort of the worry some people had. Um, and so there's this big concern and you find this a lot in writing from 99.

• 37:33Robert Evans?

  Before Hastert actually takes up the job as Speaker, a lot of people are concerned, well, he's basically just going to be a toady doing whatever Tom Delay says, right? Like Tom Delay is a way more powerful, like, congressperson than Hastert is. And so he was sometimes accused of letting Delay act as de facto Speaker. This is a fair critique, although maybe not. Here's the thing, he definitely does a lot of the things Delay would have done as Speaker, and he's really close with Delay and he takes his advice. They're also guys with the exact same politics. So I don't know how much is he just like doing?

• 38:06Speaker 04

  Right.

• 38:07Robert Evans?

  Is he, is he literally just letting Delay run things? Or is it more that they're just kind of the same guy?

• 38:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, right, exactly. They have the same outlook.

• 38:15Robert Evans?

  Right, right. I think that's probably more it, to be honest. It was Hastert's promotion to Speaker that inspired that first 1999 Chicago Tribune profile that I've quoted from several times, right? Because that's like the first thing I have found that is a detailed article about like the whole life and career of Dennis Hastert, up to the point at which he accepts the speakership, right? Um, and we'll be done with that article fairly soon because it doesn't cover anything that helped afterwards. But I have to read the opening paragraph of that article now because I have, very seldom have I read an article in which the journalist writing it more clearly wanted to fuck their subject and it's very uncomfortable. This is the first paragraph of a profile on Dennis Hastert.

• 38:55Robert Evans?

  The eyes have it, those eyes that are at once interrogating and impish, those eyes whose brown hue can barely be discerned from across the table, hidden as they are, not by the glasses he wears, but by a perpetual squint that is somehow both glaring and grinning, daunting and dancing. Those eyes, Denny Hastert's eyes, have a certitude, a focus set long ago, unchanging even as an ever-changing world passes before them. Bro.

• 39:21Speaker 04

  What the fuck is that?

• 39:23Robert Evans?

  What the fuck? What the fuck is that lead?

• 39:27Speaker 04

  Normal looking old guy and I've never heard, wow.

• 39:32Robert Evans?

  Impish? What is happening with this?

• 39:37Speaker 04

  Who wrote that and are they okay?

• 39:39Robert Evans?

  They are not, I said his name earlier. I'm worried about them now because that is a fucked up way to open a profile on a congressman.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Especially one with like the, the fucking scandals they've had, like the predation in their history. I'm like, go back and like, you still, you still stand by this quote here?

• 39:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I mean, I know Hastert's a pedophile, but I'm a little worried like, hey, Denny, did this journalist like do anything to you? Are you okay from him? I'm worried about this guy.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 40:05Robert Evans?

  Um, anyway, we don't have unlimited time here and I don't want to risk going into too much detail, just like recounting the Bush years for everybody. You all know the broad strokes of what happens after Dennis is, is made the Speaker of the House in 2000, right? You have the 2000 election, Bush becomes the president, 9/11 happens next, the United States flips out. We invade two countries, we pass the Patriot Act, we create the Department of Homeland Security. And in general, our political class makes a bunch of expensive, short sighted moves that permanently damage our society in more ways than I could name in like an hour long podcast. And Hastert has a front row seat to all of that. He plays an integral role in many pieces of that. And we'll talk about that after ads.

• 40:57Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Miles, what do you remember in 9/11?

• 41:01Speaker 04

  What do I remember?

• 41:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 04

  Uh.

• 41:04Robert Evans?

  You and I are like similar ages, right?

• 41:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was a junior in high school when 9/11 happened.

• 41:10Robert Evans?

  Oh, you're a little older than me, yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, and, uh, it was, I just remember my APUS history teacher who like really like fostered my love of history, just like came out like when we were like wheeled the TV in while we're all watching too. And it's like, like at a certain point, he turned it off. He's like, guys, I just want you to know, because we're like, what does this mean? Like, I think we were old enough to be like, yeah, something's gonna happen now because this of what we just saw. And he was just like, I'll just say this, guys, nothing's gonna be the same after this. Uh, I don't know what, but just know, like you, this will be a point where you go, and nothing was the same after this.

• 41:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 41:50Speaker 04

  And then I, and then I remember like the jingoism that was existing in the week following it.

• 41:55Robert Evans?

  Oh, man.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  And I, I drove up and down like Ventura Boulevard, like in the valley, like in a car parade. And we were just trying to like pick up girls on the side of the street. And the other wild thing too, and I remember this at the time, there were so many people like waving Israeli flags during this like 9/11 thing that at the time I was like,

• 42:14Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, because it was like solidarity with, you know, against the Islamic menace.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Right. Yeah. When you look back like that, this was, this was a signal that like, oh, we are now going like this.

• 42:25Robert Evans?

  We're gonna be doing some shit.

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Region of the world is now gonna feel American violence, basically, and we'll be able to direct that in certain directions. Anyway, so there were so many things at the time, I was just like, yeah, whatever. In retrospect, I'm like, man.

• 42:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And like anyone that age, you just become obsessed with it because it's such, you've never seen anything like that. And you know that it's the beginning and the end of something, you know, significant.

• 42:49Robert Evans?

  I mean, yeah, for me, because again, I was, you know, I came from a very conservative household. I was still, I was in like sixth or seventh grade. I was very concerned, like I listened to my parents, right? So I believed a lot of the political things they did. But I still remember being upset, like kind of weirded out by how like everyone went crazy. All of the adults I knew were like talking like fucking Bond villains about nuking the Middle East and shit that you, you like, if you were not around for that, you do not know how much discussion of that happened, particularly in red states of like, we just gotta nuke the whole, glass it all. My mom said that.

• 43:21Speaker 04

  Wow. My dad was like, my dad was in the, you don't think we deserved it camp is what I heard at home.

• 43:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it was very different for me.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  It's like, I was like, what dad? And he was like, I was like, but the people, he's like, you don't, he's like, do you know what we're doing outside of these borders? Because that's, you know, a lot of these, like, there's a lot of people that don't like this place, just so you know. And I'm like.

• 43:44Robert Evans?

  We missed some people off. It's not surprising. I'm not gonna justify it, but it's not weird that it happened.

• 43:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that Chris Rock bit about OJ. He's like, I'm not saying he didn't do it, but I understand.

• 43:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I, I, uh, I remember, one of the things I remember most in terms of like setting the mood of the time for those of you who are younger is for like a month after 9/11 happened, you could not buy clothing with American flags on it because everything that had an American flag printed on it was sold out. Flags were sold. This is my recollection from suburban Texas. Like it was crazy.

• 44:14Speaker 05

  Good years for Old Navy.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. Oh, right, right, right. Yeah. And then 2002, everything just had a fucking American flag on it, basically.

• 44:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And then 2002, you can't leave the house without one. Yeah.

• 44:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:24Robert Evans?

  Crazy stuff. Um, so as I said, Hastert had a front row seat and was a big part of why the United States had such an insane and damaging reaction to 9/11. In October of 2001, he pushed the Patriot Act through the House of Representatives and it passed 357 to 66. Hastert would from then on take personal credit for the Patriot Act's passage. He said this as late as 2011, telling a journalist, it wasn't popular and there was a lot of fight in Congress to get it through. And like, it passed 357 to 66. Like Denny.

• 44:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:57Robert Evans?

  It was popular. Now, I'll say this. I don't know if it's fair to say that like, oh, the Patriot Act would have happened if, no matter who the Republican speaker was. But Hastert is the Republican speaker who rams the Patriot Act through the House. So it's not unreasonable to blame part of it on him, right?

• 45:14Speaker 04

  Sure, sure. Definitely could have like pumped the brakes on it if he didn't think it was good. You know what I mean?

• 45:19Robert Evans?

  He didn't. That's what matters. Yeah. Denny also supported the war in Iraq and helped push for the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. He also played a role in pushing the No Child Left Behind Act, which was to say the least, a very mixed bag. It's why we all had so many standardized tests.

• 45:38Robert Evans?

  Depending on who you ask, Hastert was either a genius political operator par excellence, using his coaching skills and genial, unambitious manner to line up votes and act as a perfect House henchman for Bush and Cheney. And a big thing that like Bush liked about him and that was supposedly like, this is one of the reasons why Hastert would be a good speaker is like, he's never gonna run for president. Like, you don't have to worry about this guy trying to like build any buzz up around himself. He will be your creature, right? And he is Bush's creature for the next like, I mean, most of a decade, right? Yeah. His most influential personal innovation was something that became known as the Hastert Rule. He refused to bring any legislation to the floor that was not supported by the

• 46:20Robert Evans?

  majority of the majority, AKA the majority of the Speaker's party. And this makes sense from a political standpoint. You only remain the speaker if your reps support you. And if you bring forward a bunch of legislation they hate, you might lose your job, right? So this has always been a thing. Speakers have always, this has not been, no one ever called it a rule before, but speakers have always kept this in mind, not as like a rule, but as like, well, I don't want to put forward too much legislation that's gonna piss off my other reps, right?

• 46:47Robert Evans?

  Enshrining this as a rule, the way Hastert did, was not only nonsensical, given Hastert's actual performance, that helped to massively increase partisanship in the House. This is one of the things that just makes American politics more partisan and acrimonious, right? There's a lot of things that contribute to us getting to the point where like, a lot of Republicans are just now talking about wanting to murder their political opponents. But this is one of those things. This is a necessary step on the road, right? And also, again, I have to note, this is called the Hastert Rule. He talks about this a fair amount. This, he doesn't abide by this. No one really does. Per an article published in MSNBC by Timothy Noah, "That's when then Speaker Hastert, a Republican, pulled from the House floor the bill creating the position of Director of National Intelligence because

• 47:31Robert Evans?

  it lacked support from a majority of the Republicans he was supposedly leading. Far from being praised for this surrender of authority to the majority of the majority, Hastert was criticized for spinelessness. The bill eventually passed with a few tweaks to appease two grumpy committee chairman. Before Hastert, speakers ignored the majority of the majority whenever circumstances warranted it. The Atlantic's Molly Ball recently noted that Tip O'Neill had no choice but to violate the yet unwritten Hastert Rule many times because his caucus contained a lot of conservative Southern Democrats." Right? So number one, Hastert isn't even popular with his own people for creating the Hastert Rule. I think it's just like cowardice. It's so he can justify doing things as like, well, this is just the rule. This is just how you do things, even though it's never been how things were done. As hated as it has become, the Hastert Rule has always been a loose guideline rather

• 48:16Robert Evans?

  than a rule. In 2012, the New York Times calculated the rule had been violated 36 times in the past 22 years. Dennis Hastert violated the Hastert Rule 12 times himself, which no one knows is more than any speaker in recent memory with the possible exception of Tip O'Neill.

• 48:33Speaker 05

  Slow clap.

• 48:35Robert Evans?

  It's really funny. The Hastert Rule, and he's the guy who breaks it the most.

• 48:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, right. And then I felt like afterwards, he was also like, there really wasn't a Hastert Rule anyway.

• 48:44Robert Evans?

  He does say, there's no Hastert Rule later in like the 2010s. Yes.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, when he's out of office.

• 48:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  Freaking freak.

• 48:50Robert Evans?

  If, uh, yeah, I'm gonna conclude with another quote from Noah's article. "If Denny Hastert must be elevated to the status of prophet, remember him not for the craven rule he invented, but for his willingness to violate it again and again. Hastert never suffered any notable consequences for these transgressions." Bit of a pattern for the man.

• 49:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, truly.

• 49:09Robert Evans?

  Now, one of my favorite Hastert stories came out in the wake of 9/11. There was a woman, Sybil Edmonds, who worked for the FBI as a translator. Sybil was a naturalized Turkish-American citizen, and she spoke Turkish, Farsi, and Azerbaijani. She was very patriotic and after 9/11, she's like, I think she'd been planning to do something in maybe academia, I forget. But after 9/11, she's like, I'm going to offer my talents to my country in order to protect it from terrorist attacks, right? That's Sybil's justification for joining the FBI and working as a translator. Early in this period, she and her husband are approached by a couple, the Dickersons, who were part of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations. The Dickersons come on very strong, urging the Edmonds to join these organizations. And they're like, I don't think they'd really care about us.

• 49:53Robert Evans?

  And they're like, no, no, no, you guys are in the FBI. You should do it. And they, they kind of insinuate, you'll get a bunch of money given to you if you join these, these organizations. Because they want people high up in like the FBI and who are influential in security, right? We're trying to like, you can get bribed, basically. They don't say it outright, but they're insinuating it. And this struck Sybil as very odd. Around the same time, in her day job, listening to Turkish wiretap targets for the FBI, she starts hearing Dennis Hastert's name come up over and over again. I'm gonna quote now from an article by Vanity, in Vanity Fair. Sources familiar with this testimony say that in addition to her allegations about the Dickersons, she reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast that they had a covert

• 50:34Robert Evans?

  relationship with the very senior politician, indeed, Dennis Hastert, Republican Congressman from Illinois and the Speaker of the House since 1999. The targets reportedly discussed giving Hastert tens of thousands of dollars in surreptitious payments in exchange for political favors and information. The Dickersons, says one official familiar with the case, are only the tip of the iceberg. Now Hastert's never on any of these calls, right? It's just people talking about him in Turkish. It's possible these Turkish government dudes were lying and were like trying to pump themselves up by saying that they had, you know, Hastert, you know, willing to, maybe. But the story made journalists think back to a strange moment from earlier in Hastert's career. In the summer of 2000, he'd supported

• 51:16Robert Evans?

  a bill that would recognize the Armenian genocide as a thing that happened, right? This is a huge deal because up until, I mean, it was just a few years ago that the United States actually did recognize the Armenian genocide. And Hastert does this not because it's a good thing to do, because there's a Republican in California running in a district that's heavily Armenian, right?

• 51:33Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:34Robert Evans?

  And he thought this would help.

• 51:35Speaker 04

  This is advantageous to acknowledge the genocide purely for a voting result, yeah.

• 51:41Robert Evans?

  But still, it would have been a good thing.

• 51:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course. No, but I mean, they're so cynical that they're only looking at it in terms of like, no, this will help with my race. I mean, yeah, sure, they want this genocide recognized by the US government, but.

• 51:52Robert Evans?

  It's even worse than that because the Turkish government opposes any recognition of the Armenian genocide. Hastert was instrumental in passing the resolution out of committee with a large majority, but then in October, literally minutes before the House was set to vote on the resolution, Hastert withdrew it. His claim is he got a letter from President Clinton, and Clinton was like, oh, this will harm national security, actually. You can't let it pass, bro. It'll harm national security. We don't know why Hastert withdrew the resolution, but one of the officials at the Turkish consulate, Sybil Overheard, claimed the price to get Hastert to withdraw the resolution was around half a million dollars, right? So Sybil here

• 52:36Robert Evans?

  is a Turkish guy at the consulate being like, yeah, he needs a half a million dollars.

• 52:40Speaker 04

  And a poet.

• 52:41Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna quote again from Vanity Fair before we talk about all this. Between April of 1996 and December of 2002, unitemized personal donations to the Hastert for Congress Committee amounted to $483,000. In contrast, unitemized contributions in the same period to the committee run on behalf of the House Majority Leader, Tom Delay, Republican of Texas, were only $99,000. An analysis of the findings of four other senior Republicans shows that only one, Clay Shaw of Florida, declared a higher total in unitemized donations than Hastert over the same period. So Turkish guys are talking about he needs half a million dollars to be bribed. He gets nearly half a million dollars in unitemized donations over that period of time, and he stops the resolution getting voted on. Interesting.

• 53:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then when he was out of office, he was also like a Turkish lobbyist.

• 53:30Robert Evans?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes, Miles. I didn't realize you knew that. But yes, yes, that's what's something we're also gonna build for. Now, obviously, I can't say that he was literally bribed to remove that resolution. Maybe he wasn't, right? The only reason I would say it's not a smoking gun is that Hastert was infamously corrupt in getting bribed by a lot of lobbyists, right?

• 53:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 53:47Robert Evans?

  So there's other people the money could have come from.

• 53:49Speaker 04

  Taking it from everyone, yeah.

• 53:51Robert Evans?

  I should also note something. You know, Rob Livingston, the disgraced Congressman who was gonna be Speaker and then had to quit? You know what job he took immediately after leaving Congress?

• 54:00Speaker 04

  Turkish lobby?

• 54:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the Turkish government hired him to lead their lobbying efforts against the resolution. He was paid $700,000.

• 54:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:08Robert Evans?

  Cool stuff. I love politics. One of Denny's main interests as Speaker was prosecuting child abusers. In 2000, he supported and helped pass the Child Abuse Prevention and Enforcement Act. In 2003, after Elizabeth Smart was rescued from nine months of captivity, he called for a national notification system for child kidnappings and demanded repeat child molesters like himself be sent to jail for the rest of their lives. There's actually a lot more of Hastert pretending to be a big wants-to-fight-the-pedophiles guy, but you get the idea, right?

• 54:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:40Robert Evans?

  Like, it's, yeah.

• 54:42Speaker 04

  It's a good smokescreen or a shield against future accusations, I'm sure, in his mind. Well, I've been always on the side of children.

• 54:51Robert Evans?

  I'm an anti-pedophile.

• 54:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:53Robert Evans?

  During Hastert's time as Speaker, he gained a reputation for being historically bad at reining in corruption among House Representatives. It became vastly more normal during his tenure for Congressmen to not just take money from lobbyists, but to deliberately work out ways to profit from their position. For an article in the New York Times, "The Military Spending Bill for the 2000 Fiscal Year Contained 997 Earmarks. By 2005, that number had grown to 2,506. In 2000, the largest domestic spending bill which funded labor, health, and education programs had 491 pet projects. By 2005, it had 3,014. Steve Ellis, Vice President of Taxpayers for Common Sense, recalled 2005 as the perfect storm of the

• 55:34Robert Evans?

  profligate era with 15,000 earmarks in appropriations bills, the bridge to nowhere in Alaska, which became a symbol of the need for changes to the system, the conviction of Representative Randy Cunningham on corruption charges for his selling of earmarks, and the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal."

• 55:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:51Robert Evans?

  Ah, yeah. All this good stuff is happening while Denny's the Speaker of the House, right? And it's, he is very famous, and part of his popularity is he brings back a lot of money for his district. And a lot of it's in like, does the federal government really need to be spending money on this? Probably not.

• 56:07Speaker 04

  Golden water fountains for everyone, yeah.

• 56:11Robert Evans?

  Did he help to normalize that kind of fucking graft in corruption, which I would call that a kind of corruption? Absolutely. He's a big part of it, right? Is it also occurring independent of him? You know, yes, that's also very fair.

• 56:23Speaker 04

  And also just like, this is the era of full-blown corporate embrace of Washington DC. It's all happening with Tom Delay and Grover Norquist and all these guys.

• 56:33Robert Evans?

  Oh, Grover, another guy I used to talk to. Yes.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  It's all just, yeah, it's like, oh, this is, I think that's really important for people to know too about this era. Like, this is really when companies are like, well, how do I change bills? And you have people like Tom Delay. It's like, you don't give any money to Democrats, you give them to Republicans.

• 56:49Robert Evans?

  Give me money.

• 56:50Speaker 04

  And because we're running things, we'll give you an audience. And that's how things are gonna be done now.

• 56:54Robert Evans?

  That's how it works. Yep. And now we're gonna talk a little bit about the Jack Abramoff scandal. Jack is another, back in the day, when I would do, was particularly reporting on the 2015, 2016 election season, I interviewed Jack, I interviewed Grover, I interviewed a lot of these people, sometimes multiple times.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Did he wear his cool hat?

• 57:12Robert Evans?

  I don't recall him wearing a hat at the time.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  At the time, he was always.

• 57:17Robert Evans?

  He got out of prison not all that recently, or not all that long ago. Jack Abramoff also, in addition to being a lobbyist, produced the Dolph Lundgren movie Red Scorpion for reasons that are politically frustrating. He had incredible access to the Bush administration and was part of Bush's transition team. Over the next six years, he used the connections he made there to commit fraud on a vast scale with a whole bunch of our elected leaders, and eventually he pled guilty to three felonies. The Abramoff scandal was disastrous for Hastert's best friends in the House. Tom Delay was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for money laundering and conspiracy, although the case was overturned for, again, frustrating reasons. Another Hastert friend was Robert Ney, who in 2007 was sentenced

• 57:59Robert Evans?

  to almost three years in prison over a conspiracy to commit multiple offenses all centered around his relationship with Jack Abramoff. Here's a fun summary of just one of his crimes from the Department of Justice. "Ney admitted that he accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of gambling chips from a foreign businessman who was hoping to sell US-made airplanes and airplane parts in a foreign country." Just, just give me chips. Just give me chips.

• 58:21Speaker 04

  Give me those. What'll it take? Give me, give me those chips.

• 58:24Robert Evans?

  Just give me chips that's as good as cash, right? Give me those chips. I'm gonna go right to the slots. I'm taking this shit to the tables, baby. Putting it all on black.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Did you hear our agreement? Yeah, yeah, whatever you want, man. Whatever you want. Just give me the fucking chips, man.

• 58:35Robert Evans?

  Give me those fucking chips. I got a problem. Now Hastert does not get any, in any serious personal trouble over Abramoff, but he definitely does shit that should have been illegal during this period of time. And he's just a little smarter about it than some of his colleagues. By the mid aughts, he and two business partners had acquired 138 acres of farmland outside of Plano, Illinois, near the site of a proposed highway, the Prairie Highway. One of his partners in this business venture was Dallas Ingamson, his former mentor from the State House days. Hastert, the humble farmer, supported this highway even though opponents pointed out it would destroy farmland and suburbanize the region. One opponent of the highway said it was crammed down the throats of a rural

• 59:16Robert Evans?

  community backed by commercial interests. Hastert was one such interest, and he successfully used his position to earmark $207 million for the project in a 2005 transportation bill. Next, per the Washington Post, "Four months after the bill was signed, Hastert's trust sold the land to a real estate developer who planned to build 1,700 homes on the parcel. Hastert's share of the proceeds was worth more than $3 million. Ingamson later told the Chicago Tribune, "But his role in the deal was not made public until Hastert reported real estate transactions in the area on his annual personal financial disclosure in May 2006, which the Sunlight Foundation used to match against local land records and connect him to the trust. Hastert dismissed the idea that the land was more valuable because of his earmark. Nothing to it, Hastert said at the time."

• 1:00:00Robert Evans?

  Again, he profits like $3 million from this deal that he earmarks after having bought up the land, knowing where the, anyway.

• 1:00:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's, Taylor's old as time, you know? Like, I remember when, like, my first sort of foray into politics was working on a clean energy bill that was like getting renewables in, like, the state of California. Little did I know, it was being penned by a billionaire who had a parcel of land, and the way that the bill was written, that basically the only place to build this solar facility was on this tract of land the guy had based on these very specific things.

• 1:00:35Robert Evans?

  Oh, fun.

• 1:00:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. And most people were like, yeah, we need more renewable energy. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, to build on this very specific site for this person to make a fuck-ton of money on. Yeah, it's, yeah, it's the benefit, I guess, of being high up there enough the director of the money goes, yeah.

• 1:00:51Robert Evans?

  That too, yeah. Being in control of the money.

• 1:00:55Robert Evans?

  2006 was Hastert's terrible year as Speaker. That same year saw the explosion of a scandal involving another Hastert friend, Representative Mark Foley from Florida. Do you remember the Mark Foley scandal, Miles?

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah.

• 1:01:07Robert Evans?

  Oh yeah, yeah. It turns out Foley had for years been sending sexually explicit text messages and sometimes physically, sexually harassing teenaged congressional pages. A separate Chicago Tribune article notes that for nearly a decade, Foley had been called a nuisance and a ticking time bomb by his peers because of his incessant attraction to male pages. Quote, "A number of witnesses testified they had been told that in one case Foley, possibly intoxicated, appeared at the page dorm after their curfew and was turned away," it said. So, that's not great.

• 1:01:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, that's bad. That's 100% bad.

• 1:01:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Hastert had been repeatedly warned about Foley again. People are coming to Hastert as the Speaker, being like, "This guy is a problem. He's going to cause us issues. He's a ticking time bomb."

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  Right, right.

• 1:01:55Robert Evans?

  And Denny's like, "I'll deal with it. No, it's all fine. It's okay. Don't worry about it." Right? There's evidence he tried to help cover up some of his friends' indiscretions, per that Tribune piece. Quote, "By the end of 2006, the House Ethics Committee put out a 200-plus-page report indicating that Hastert, his aides, and others had failed to take sufficient steps to put a stop to Foley's longstanding overtures to current and former House pages. Hastert was singled out for not acting on warnings about Foley's emails, cautions delivered separately to him by two GOP officials in the spring of 2006. That was months before media attention on the sexually charged communications Foley sent to former pages led to Foley's resignation. The warnings came after top Hastert aides were told Foley was behaving inappropriately with pages," the report said.

• 1:02:37Robert Evans?

  So again, he gets warned about this and for some reason, he decides to back his friend, the guy doing creepy shit with teenagers. I wonder why?

• 1:02:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:47Robert Evans?

  Huh, yeah, confusing. It was the combined weight of these scandals and the disastrous 2006 midterms, which do not go well for the Republican Party, in part due to these scandals, that forced an end to Hastert's historically long-term as Speaker of the House. He ultimately would leave Congress after his term expired. In interviews at the time, he expressed a desire to relax, paint fishing lures, and work on his classic cars. Because he was so obviously corrupt, everyone speculated that he would become a lobbyist once the one-year waiting period expired after his term. His oldest son, Joshua, took a job as a lobbyist at a major firm, the second, pretty much, that his dad became Speaker. So people are like, "Are you gonna do what your kid did?" Right? Like, clearly did to take advantage of you being the Speaker.

• 1:03:29Robert Evans?

  As a contemporary article in the Daily Herald noted, quote, and this is them interviewing Hastert, "I don't really see myself as a lobbyist and would probably not do that at all," Hastert said. Okay. You wanna guess what job he took a year later?

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  Say, man.

• 1:03:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's lobbyist.

• 1:03:47Speaker 04

  Take that flight to Istanbul, baby.

• 1:03:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, that's right, baby, that's right. He takes a job as a lobbyist with Dikstein Shapiro, at the time a major Washington-based firm. He was paid a reported $1 million a year to manage a mix of energy firms, real estate developers, and tobacco companies as clients. One of the big things Hastert does is his client is Lorillard Tobacco. They pay Dikstein Shapiro $8 million to run their lobbying to allow candy-flavored electronic cigarettes? Dennis Hastert spearheads the project, and he's really successful at it. He's a part of why we have flavored, like, nicotine vapes these days.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  Fucking jewels and shit, wow.

• 1:04:22Robert Evans?

  Why all the teens got addicted to nicotine again. Yeah. We have old Denny Hastert to thank for a piece of that.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  And vaping, Jesus.

• 1:04:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He also represented the Republic of Turkey, who paid his firm roughly $240,000 a year. Weird.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  Great. That's great. That's really great for him, yeah.

• 1:04:39Robert Evans?

  I love that. I'm sure he did only good things. For several long years, Hastert just made money, but his victims from decades ago were still out there and still angry. Last episode, we talked about Steve Rainbolt, one of the students molested by Hastert. He had died tragically of AIDS in the 1990s, but his sister Jolene survived him and never stopped hating Hastert, especially since he had the audacity to show up at her brother's funeral. And this isn't like 95. Per an article with her by ABC News, "I was there, just there, trying to bite my tongue, thinking that blood was coming out, because I was just..." So, after he had gone through the line, I followed him out into the parking lot of the funeral home. I said, "I wanna know why you did what you did to my brother." And he just stood there and stared at me. He didn't say, "What are you talking about, you know, or what? I don't know what you're talking about." He just stood there and stared at me.

• 1:05:25Robert Evans?

  Then I just continued to say, "I want you to know your secret didn't die in there with my brother, and I want you to remember that I'm out here and that I know." And again, he just stood there and did not say a word. Hastert got in his car and drove away.

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:05:38Robert Evans?

  So, cool stuff.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  Damn.

• 1:05:40Robert Evans?

  Jolene, over the next years, will repeatedly try to take action against Hastert. She writes to ABC News and another news organization, but they ignore her. After Mark Foley gets busted in 2006, she writes to some survivor advocacy groups, but again, gets nowhere. And then, in May of 2015, Jolene gets a call from the FBI. They were looking into allegations that Hastert had abused his students while a wrestling coach. Did she know anything about that? Obviously, she talks to them. And a few days later, the story drops. One of Hastert's former victims, now an adult, and this person is still anonymous, had made contact with him at some point, I think in the 20-teens it would have had to happen, or 20-tens. Denny, desperate to avoid publicity over, like, what he had done to this kid and others,

• 1:06:25Robert Evans?

  promised to pay him $3.5 million in hush money. Now, he could have gotten away with it. It's not illegal to just send whoever you want $3.5 million, and they don't have to tell anyone why you're doing it, right? If you have $3.5 million, you can't just send it to somebody. But, there's a problem. Because of the Patriot Act that Denny had helped to pass, taking out that much money and sending it to someone all at once trips up, there's a bunch of reporting requirements that are going to bring additional scrutiny on you, right? So to try and avoid this kind of attention, he starts structuring his payments to this person in under $10,000 increments to avoid setting off alarms. However, structuring is an obvious tactic that the feds expect criminals and terrorist

• 1:07:10Robert Evans?

  organizations to use, and so they notice what he's doing. They're like, "Well, this look, this is clearly structuring. It's a bunch of, like, $9,800 payments to someone. Like, what the fuck is happening here, Denny?" So they noticed what he was doing, and they opened an investigation. And that is more or less how things come crashing down for Denny Hastert. He lies about some stuff, like, some of the things he's done financially are illegal, and he, you know, he tries to cover up initially what had happened. It does not take long for everyone to find out what he'd done. I think Hastert is initially claiming, "Oh, it's fake blackmail. I was just paying them to avoid, like, the publicity nightmare." Right?

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  Right, right, right.

• 1:07:46Robert Evans?

  And so, and that's, there's a period of at least a few days to a few weeks where that's all people know. And so there's a bunch of articles at the time, like, interviewing his former students at his wrestling, that had wrestled for him, interviewing his former colleagues, everyone being like, "No, Denny would never do anything of this. I never saw anything like that. He's always been a great guy. He's a really cool dude." And like, 40 people write letters on his behalf to the judge, talking about what a good guy he is. And then after a couple of weeks, the rest of the story comes out. More victims come forward. The prosecutors announce at least five people say that he molested them when they were children. Yeah, so, people, a lot, I think a bunch of those 40-character references are withdrawn at that point, although there are some funny ones from some of his friends in Congress,

• 1:08:29Robert Evans?

  including Tom Delay, that it's like, "Oh yeah, really wanted to bat, go to bat for this guy, huh?"

• 1:08:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, right? I mean, they'll always have those letter, like, that's sick that, it's always like a thing where you're always like, "You sure you wanna write that letter of support?"

• 1:08:41Robert Evans?

  Sure you wanna write that? Maybe check, maybe check.

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  You sure about that? Yeah, it might not look good.

• 1:08:46Robert Evans?

  Maybe let a couple more cards fall before we go do that.

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  But it's also like the kind of thing, like, a guy like Denny Hastert could summon because of the amount of wealth he also created for all these other craven freaks around him, that they're also like, "Yeah, man, you need me to back you up on something? I know the drill. We fucking do whatever we need to, to get this shit done."

• 1:09:05Robert Evans?

  Absolutely, Denny. Yeah. So, one of the debt problems is that, you know, it's become out what he's done. People are willing to talk about it and do testify in court about what he did to them, but the statute of limitations for his crimes has long since passed, right? So he can't actually be charged for any of the sex offenses he committed. He is only charged and convicted for the financial crimes. However, the judge in his case does declare him a serial child molester. He makes, like, it's honestly, it's a really shitty apology, right? Like, and fucking Jolene comes after him, being like, "You can't even fucking really admit that you actually did it," right? He calls, he sends a letter to his friends, saying like, "I'm a victim too. I'm not even clear what he was arguing about there." But he's, he does not, in any way, take real accountability for his actions.

• 1:09:49Speaker 04

  Sure, sure, yeah.

• 1:09:50Robert Evans?

  He's sentenced to 15 months in prison. He serves 13, and he's released in 2017, and he just died a few weeks ago.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:09:58Robert Evans?

  So, that's the Dennis Hastert story.

• 1:10:02Speaker 05

  Holy shit, I'm glad that guy's dead.

• 1:10:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Woo! We should talk about him more. People don't talk about Hastert often enough.

• 1:10:10Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:10:10Speaker 04

  No, I don't think so. And I think at the time, too, like, it, when the scandal came out, people were just, like, already consumed with so many other scandals. And I think the other part that people have to connect is, like, really where he, like, the place he holds in the continuum of, like, the degradation of, like, how, you know, partisanship was happening, and also just, like, the corporate cronyism that became just, like, by default the way of doing business. I mean, not that it wasn't that bad, but like, this was truly, like, it, this was when it was really...

• 1:10:42Robert Evans?

  It gets worse.

• 1:10:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly, like, the foundation of, like, a lot of the stuff we see now.

• 1:10:47Robert Evans?

  I think it's a mistake to look at corruption in Congress, but, well, it's all, and yeah, there's always been corruption in Congress, but it also got a lot worse and a lot more blatant. And Hastert's a significant part of that, right?

• 1:10:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:59Robert Evans?

  I mean, it's, there is debate as to how much he drove himself and how much of it was just like, he would passively let, he was doing the work of other men to enable this corruption, right? But also, he got, well, pretty rich himself, so I'm gonna say Hastert deserves a fair amount of the blame personally, too.

• 1:11:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're not, no, and you can't, you're not entirely passive to even reach that level of trust with these other freaks, you know? At the top, it's, yeah, sure, you may have been malleable, and they liked that about you, but that's not all to say that you were just like a mindless automaton. You're like, "I didn't know what I did."

• 1:11:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, you knew damn well.

• 1:11:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38Robert Evans?

  Anyway, Miles, I know damn well that you have several podcasts.

• 1:11:43Speaker 04

  Damn right. You can check me out every day on the Daily Zeitgeist with Jack O'Brien, formerly of Cracked.com, also talking about the Premier League and the Champions League, that's soccer, you know, on Ain't a Footy with Jamel Johnson and Chris Martin. And God, another one, if you like 90 Day Fiance, because that's how I unwind, especially after having to talk about shit like this, then I watch trash reality TV with the homie Sofia Alexandra on 420 Day Fiance. So check that out, too, if you so please. And you can also find me everywhere at Miles of Gray, G R A Y.

• 1:12:18Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. Check it out if you please, and check it out if you don't please, right? Maybe you're torturing somebody and you just want to put something on at like 150 decibels to blow out their eardrums, you know? Any podcast is good for that. Why not use one of ours or our friends, you know?

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  Please, please.

• 1:12:33Robert Evans?

  Look, we found out that people actively committing torture are 3% of our audience, actually, which is low for podcasts. The Joe Rogan Experience is up to 20%, but look, we care about every listener, you know?

• 1:12:43Speaker 04

  Hey, look, let's get those numbers up.

• 1:12:45Robert Evans?

  Let's get those numbers up. That's all I'm saying. Anyway, Denny Hastert.

• 1:12:52Speaker 05

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com/AtBehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

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  Underdog already has team picks, player props, money lines, spreads, you name it, they got it. But apparently, somebody over there said, you know what's missing? Screaming like a maniac about a rookie card on your couch. And we love them for that. Because Underdog now has rips. You get a digital pack, starting at just $5. You check the live odds, see which grails you could pull, then rip it open to reveal a real, physical card. And the grails are no joke. They have cards up to $125,000 in value, and plenty to pull. From football and basketball to Pokemon, with new limited edition packs dropping regularly. Even cooler, you can decide to keep the card and Underdog will ship it straight to your home, or sell it back instantly at 100% of its fair market value. And the cash

• 1:14:11Speaker 01

  goes right in your account. No listing it online, no stranger lowballing you in the messages. Just rip, reveal, and cash out instantly. Or make some room on your shelf. Download Underdog and get in on the chase. Get five free rips packs when you deposit $5. Real rips, real cards, real cash. Only on Underdog. Unleash your dog. 18+, terms apply. Top grails are extremely rare.

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  Cash Flow Crunch, OnDeck's small business line of credit, gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

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  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.