Did Dennis Hastert Accept Bribes from Drug Smugglers?

Chris Deliso: Hmm, well I know you can’t name names, but can you tell me if any specific officials will suffer if your testimony comes out?

Sibel Edmonds: Yes. Certain elected officials will stand trial and go to prison.

“Edmonds has given confidential testimony inside a secure Sensitive
Compartmented Information Facility on several occasions: to congressional staffers, to investigators from the OIG, and to staff
from the 9/11 commission,” Rose continues.

“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 relationship with a very senior Republican indeed—Dennis Hastert, Republican congressman from Illinois and Speak
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 just the tip of the iceberg.”

“Some of the calls reportedly contained what sounded like references to large scale drug shipments and other crimes,” writes Rose. “One
name, however, apparently stood out—a man the Turkish callers often referred to by the nickname “Denny boy.” It was the Republican congressman from Illinois and Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert.

According to some of the wiretaps, the FBI’s targets had arranged for thousands of dollars to be paid to Hastert’s campaign funds in small
checks. Under Federal Election Commission rules, donations of less than $200 are not required to be itemized in public filings.

“Hastert himself was never heard on the recordings, Edmonds told investigators and it is possible that the claims of covert payments
were hollow boasts,” Rose says. “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 fund amounted to $483,000. In contrast, un-itemized contributions to 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 filings of four other senior Republicans shows that only one, Clay Shaw, of Florida declared a higher total of un-itemized donations that Hastert during the same
period: $552,000…

“Edmonds reportedly added that the recordings contained repeated references to Hastert’s flip-flop in the fall of 2000,” Rose pens,
“over an issue which remains of intense concern to the Turkish government—the continuing campaign to have Congress designate the killings of Armenians between 1915 and 1923 a genocide. For many
years, attempts had been made to get the House to pass a genocide resolution, but they never got anywhere until August 2000, when Hastert, as Speaker, announced that he would give it his backing and see that it received a full House vote…Thanks to Hastert, the resolution, vehemently opposed by the Turks, passed… Then on October
19, minutes before the full House vote, Hastert withdrew it. He attributed it to a letter from President Clinton.

“I once owned a Lear jet that was chartered by a pilot in Fort Lauderdale,” Hilliard said. “He had a customer in Venezuela and made a few regular trips back and forth. On one trip, it cleared customs and flew to Orlando on the way to Washington, D.C. When they got to Orlando, he was greeted by the DEA. They searched the luggage of the passenger and found heroin.

“The passenger went straight to jail. The pilot went straight to jail for about 15 hours. He may have been dumb, but it wasn’t illegal. It was a charter flight, and there was no way the pilot was guilty of anything, and I hadn’t been within 50 miles of the plane at the time.