We are not overlooking absolute anything. As usual, it's not the crime itself but
the attempted coverup. In this case and any other case involving conservative and fundamentalist crook, why is hypocrisy not a deadly sin?
I get the hypocrisy - Hastert pursued Clinton on a legal technicality and now the shoe is on the other foot. That definitely makes him unsympathetic, and there is a certain schadenfreude in watching his fall.
My outlook on the hypocrisy is that I thought the whole Clinton-impeachment-for-perjury was unwarranted, and I will apply the same standard to Hastert - why is the FBI going after this?
It's not illegal to pay someone off to keep their mouth shut. On the contrary, it's illegal to
ask for money to keep one's mouth shut. On that score, Hastert is the victim, not the criminal.
He structured the cash withdrawals in less than $10,000 increments, so the banks wouldn't raise an alarm to the Feds. That is technically illegal, but the reason for that is to catch drug, mafia, or bribe money being moved. I can't think of another instance of someone being prosecuted for that when it wasn't also a part of a drug or mafia bust.
The FBI did their investigation, they discovered what he was using the money for (nothing illegal) - yet they slapped him with this cash structuring technical charge, and for perjury when he lied to them earlier about what he was using the money for. (That fits pretty squarely with the "lying about sex" perjury that was used against Clinton, which I also thought was much ado about nothing.)
Why bother to do that? This is not a public official taking bribes; Hastert was not funding drug lords or secretly supporting terrorists. He was the victim of blackmail. It seems to me that the FBI should be going after the blackmailer, not the guy that was being scammed out of millions.
Certainly Hastert is a big hypocrite. No argument there. But its not illegal to be an asshole.
The person I have NO SYMPATHY for is the middle-aged guy that bled the former House Speaker of millions, just because he knew he had him over a barrel. Talk about greedy! Maybe if he got $200k and called it a day I might think - well OK, he got even. But $3 million!