Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert has been indicted on banking crimes. Did he steal money from the bank? No. Did he fail to pay his taxes? No.

So what was his ‘crime’? He withdrew his own money from his bank because he was being blackmailed over alleged sexual misconduct that took place more than 35 years ago. The following is from the LA Times:

“The indictment alleged Hastert had agreed to pay a total of $3.5 million to ‘compensate for and conceal his prior misconduct.’

“He made several cash payments beginning in 2010, after being contacted by the individual, the indictment said.

“Hastert allegedly began by withdrawing $50,000 at a time, but when the activity was questioned by banking officials, he reduced the withdrawals to under $10,000, the indictment said.

“That caught the attention of financial regulators, who suspected Hastert was trying to evade federal reporting requirements.”

The government isn’t concerned about the sex charges being leveled against the former Speaker of the House. The Feds are going after Hastert because (1) he’s a Republican and (2) because he broke some made up law about how a person can’t withdraw his own money from his bank.

The Clintons are raking in hundreds of millions of dollars coming from foreign nations. The entire Clinton Foundation looks like a scam as a way to pay the Clintons extraordinary amounts of money for political favors.

Instead of investigating the Clintons, the government is going after Hastert for using his own money to pay someone to keep quiet about what happened decades ago.

And the media are complicit in the double standard.

You might be asking, “Where did Hastert get $3.5 million?” to use as hush money. That’s the better question. Hastert made his money as a lobbyist after leaving Congress. A lobbyist uses his connections to get Congress to appropriate money from tax payers to benefit business interests. It’s a ‘legal’ to steal from tax payers.

Also, there were some shady deals while Hastert was in Congress. The following is from Ben Shapiro at Breitbart:

“In his New York Times bestseller Throw Them All Out, Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer revealed how former Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) entered Congress with modest means and emerged a millionaire by brokering crony deals to increase the value of his land.

“Initially, Hastert’s farm was worth between $50,000 and $100,000. In 2002 and 2004, Hastert bought up Illinois farm land for $15,000 an acre before inserting a $207 million earmark into the federal highway bill to build critical roads near the land to increase its worth as a prospective residential community. The land’s value shot up to $36,000 an acre, a 140% profit.

“‘According to Haster’s personal financial disclosure, these sales amounted to transactions of between $2 million and $10 million for his personal stake,’ writes Schweizer. ‘Not a bad return for a short-term investment.’”

Hastert isn’t the only person who did and does things like this. It’s what politicians do. It’s called crony capitalism, but it doesn’t have anything to do with the principles of capitalism.