BuzzFeed reports that the Justice Department has indicted former Republican speaker of the House Dennis Hastert for some kind of misconduct related to payments he made to someone he’d mistreated in the past.
If that sounds mystifying, that’s because, for now, it is. The basic gist of it, however, appears to be that he was making unusual withdrawals from his bank accounts, which prompted attention from federal investigators, whom he then led astray — or, as the indictment puts it, “did knowingly and willfully make materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statements and representations in a matter within the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”