Dennis Hastert, the nation’s longest-serving Republican House speaker, who helped turn much of President George W. Bush’s agenda into law before his legacy was forever fouled by allegations that he molested high school athletes when he was a wrestling coach, died over the weekend at the age of 84, a coroner said on Monday.
Hastert, who was speaker from 1999 until 2007, died of natural causes at his home, according to Kendall County, Illinois, Coroner Jacquie Purcell.
When he was sentenced in 2016 to more than a year behind bars, the former history teacher became one of the highest-ranking American politicians ever ordered to prison.
In the late 1990s, Hastert was a little-known Illinois lawmaker with a reputation for congeniality that had helped him ascend the ranks of congressional leaders. When Newt Gingrich lost support because of ethics violations and the GOP’s poor showing in an election, Republicans elected Hastert to succeed him. In his first weeks on the job, he presided over the House while the Senate conducted Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial.
After the GOP reclaimed the White House, Hastert took much of what Bush proposed and steered it to passage, including massive tax cuts and a measure that amounted to a huge expansion of prescription drug benefits — the biggest change in Medicare in decades.
In 2015, Hastert was accused of evading banking regulations as part of a plan to pay hush money to conceal unspecified “prior misconduct.” Nearly a year later, prosecutors filed papers that described what media reports had suggested for months: Hastert’s misconduct involved the sexual abuse of teenage boys on his wrestling team in the small town of Yorkville, west of Chicago.
During a 16-year coaching career, he led his team to a state championship and was named national coach of the year in 1976. But behind the accolades, prosecutors said, Hastert sexually abused at least four team members from 1965 to 1981.
The person Hastert was paying, identified in court papers only as Individual A, said the abuse occurred in a motel room when he was 14 on the way home from wrestling camp. Hastert allegedly touched other wrestlers in a locker room after saying he would give them massages. Two wrestlers said Hastert performed sex acts on them.
Prosecutors also described a recliner where Hastert often sat in the locker room with a direct view of the stalls where the boys showered.
Hastert pleaded guilty to evading banking laws. In all, he paid more than $1.7 million out of $3.5 million that he had promised to Individual A, sometimes in lump sums of $100,000 cash.
At the sentencing hearing where he received 15 months behind bars, the visibly angry judge called Hastert a “serial child molester.” A former wrestler struggled with his emotions as he told the court about his “dark secret” from adolescence.
In his own statement, Hastert said he was “deeply ashamed” and admitted that he “mistreated” some of his athletes. But he never referred directly to sexual abuse.
