By Philip Giraldi
Alleged misconduct by the House speaker was well known to
the FBI—and to Turkey and Israel. As former House Speaker Dennis Hastert
prepares to plead guilty in accordance with a deal he has made with federal
prosecutors, most media will focus on the crimes the FBI mentioned in his
indictment. Since Hastert was charged in May, the public has been shocked to
learn that the former high-school wrestling coach allegedly spent large sums
trying to cover up past sexual abuse. But one prominent whistleblower has been
speaking up about the possible misdeeds of Hastert for years now—and the way
that they may have compromised national security.
Angela Farley / Shutterstock.com
Longtime readers of The American Conservative are
familiar with the Sibel Edmonds saga. Edmonds, an FBI translator who revealed
large-scale corruption throughout the government, has received multiple gag
orders under the State Secrets Act. She has nevertheless persevered in spite of
concerns that she would be prosecuted and possibly imprisoned. TAC interviewed
her for a feature article in 2009, and I also reviewed her claims multiple
times over the last few years, including when her book Classified Woman came
out in 2012.
Many of Edmonds’s claims involved Turkish and Israeli
front groups seeking to influence U.S. policy while sometimes also engaging in
illegal activity. The scope of the corruption allegedly involved bribery of
senior government officials and congressmen, arranging for export licenses to
countries that were embargoed, and the exposure of classified information.
Edmonds has been questioned by a congressional committee, by individual
congressmen and staffers, as well as by the FBI inspector general, and her
information was found to be “credible,” “serious,” and “warrant[ing] a thorough
and careful review.” She also provided interviews for “60 Minutes” and Vanity
Fair, both of which were able to confirm key elements of her story.
Some critics have opined that Edmonds overstates or
misinterprets what she claims to know, but there is no reason to doubt her
veracity when she describes documents and investigative files that she
personally handled during her time with the bureau. No one has challenged her
accounts of the investigations that were underway at that time. She has been
gagged by the Justice Department precisely because the information she revealed
is damaging to certain political and purported national-security interests.
In the course of her various media appearances, Edmonds
provided significant information on Congressman Hastert, who was under FBI
investigation while he was speaker of the House, a role he assumed in 1999 and
held for eight years. In her TAC interview, Edmonds related that “In early
1997, because of the information that the FBI was getting on the Turkish
diplomatic community, the Justice Department had already started to investigate
several Republican congressmen. The number-one congressman involved with the
Turkish community, both in terms of providing information and doing favors, was
Bob Livingston. Number-two after him was Dan Burton, and then he became
number-one until Hastert became the speaker of the House. Bill Clinton’s attorney
general, Janet Reno, was briefed on the investigations, and since they were
Republicans, she authorized that they be continued… In 1999, [FBI agents in the
Chicago field office] wiretapped the congressmen directly.”
In a deposition given in August 2009, Edmonds identified
Hastert as “one of the primary U.S. persons involved in operations and
activities that are not legal, and they’re not for the interest of the United
States but for the interest of foreign governments and foreign entities.” She
detailed what she believed to be Hastert’s wrongdoing: “This information has
been public. The concerns, again would be several categories. The acceptance of
large sums of bribery in forms of cash or laundered cash and laundering is to
make it look legal for his campaigns, and also for his personal use, in order
to do certain favors and call certain—call for certain actions, make certain
things happen for foreign entities and foreign governments’ interests, Turkish
government’s interest and Turkish business entities’ interests.”
When asked in the deposition, “Did you have reason to
believe that Mr. Hastert, for example, killed one of the Armenian genocide
resolutions in exchange for money from these Turkish organizations?” she
responded, “Yes, I do… Correct… and not only taking money, but other
activities, too, including being blackmailed for various reasons.” At the time
of the deposition Hastert had left Congress and was working for the Washington
lobbying firm Dickstein Shapiro as a registered lobbyist for Turkey, reportedly
earning millions of dollars in commissions.
Edmonds described her work on Turkish-language
transcripts of investigations relating to Hastert covering the period 1996
until January 2003, elaborating on the possibility of blackmail. She recalled that
Hastert “used the townhouse [in Chicago] that was not his residence for certain
not very morally accepted activities. Now, whether that was being used as
blackmail I don’t know, but the fact that foreign entities [Turkey and Israel]
knew about this, in fact, they sometimes participated in some of those not
maybe morally well activities in that particular townhouse that was supposed to
be an office, not a house, residence at certain hours, certain days, evenings
of the week. So I can’t say if that was used as blackmail or not, but certain
activities they would share. They were known.”
In testimony before congressional staffers and
committees, Edmonds has reported hearing Turkish wiretap targets boast of their
secret relationship with a “Hastert.” They discussed giving him tens of
thousands of dollars in clandestine payments in exchange for political favors
and information. Many of the transcripts involved a suspect at the city’s
Turkish Consulate, as well as several members of the American-Turkish Council
and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, business entities that some
FBI agents believed served as occasional covers for organized crime. Some calls
appeared to be referring to drug shipments and other possible crimes.
One important contact was repeatedly referred to by
Turkish callers under the nickname “Denny boy,” later identified as Hastert.
The wiretaps revealed that tens of thousands of dollars were paid to Hastert’s
campaign fund in small checks because donations of less than $200 need not be
itemized in public filings.
Vanity Fair did its own due diligence in covering
Edmonds’s claims, and the magazine’s David Rose wrote:
Hastert himself was never heard in the recordings,
Edmonds told investigators, and it is possible that the claims of covert
payments were hollow boasts. Nevertheless, an examination of Hastert’s federal
filings shows that the level of un-itemized payments his campaigns received
over many years was relatively high. Between April 1996 and December 2002,
un-itemized personal donations to the Hastert for Congress Committee amounted
to $483,000.
Edmonds noted that the phone taps contained repeated
references to Hastert’s volte face in the fall of 2000 over the campaign to
have Congress designate the killings of Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and
1923 a genocide. In August 2000, Speaker Hastert declared that he would support
the resolution and send it to the full House for a vote. The resolution,
vehemently opposed by the Turks, did indeed pass in the International Relations
Committee by a large majority. Then, on October 19, shortly before a full House
vote, Hastert withdrew it.
Hastert explained his switch as being based on a letter
he had supposedly received from President Clinton arguing that the resolution,
if passed, would be damaging to U.S. interests. It is not known if a payoff
ever occurred but, per Edmonds, a senior official at the Turkish Consulate indicated
in one recorded conversation that the price for convincing Hastert to withdraw
the genocide resolution would be at least $500,000.
Fast forward to the Dennis Hastert case making the rounds
today, which focuses on relatively minor federal banking laws and ignores the
other evidence that has been collected by the FBI on Hastert for the past 20
years. One has to ask, “Why Hastert and why now?”, but there does not seem to
be a simple answer. It might be little more than the result of frustrated FBI investigators
demanding that some action be taken.
Edmonds, for her part, has described how the Hastert case
has been ignored by the media and has predicted that it would eventually be
made to go away by the government. Indeed, legal action following up on the
original indictment has been delayed through postponement after postponement
and more recently sidetracked into a plea bargain that will allow the former
congressman to plead guilty to reduced charges while at the same time sealing
forever the unsavory details linked to his being blackmailed.
Hastert and his lawyers understand that they are well
placed to effectively threaten the government prosecutors because Hastert knows
where a lot of bodies are buried, metaphorically speaking. By demanding that the
investigative files on him—which could include reports of illegal activity by a
broad range of former officials—be released as part of his defense, he can
force the government to drop or mitigate the charges against him. It is a ploy
similar to that used by alleged AIPAC spies Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman in
2009, which led to the presiding judge’s dismissal of the case.
Glenn Greenwald writes that “Those with political and
financial clout are routinely allowed to break the law with no legal repercussions
whatsoever. Often they need not even exploit their access to superior lawyers
because they don’t see the inside of a courtroom in the first place—not even
when they get caught in the most egregious criminality.” There is a particular
irony here: criminals in high office may avoid punishment through their
willingness to implicate their peers who are engaged in much the same
practices, in effect blackmailing the government to leave them alone or face
the consequences. That is what the Dennis Hastert story appears to be all
about.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, is executive
director of the Council for the National Interest.
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