Denny Hastert "was a bland, utterly conventional supporter of the status quo; his idea of reform was to squelch..."

"... anyone who disturbed Congress’s usual way of doing business," writes John Fund "How Did Denny Hastert Get Rich Enough to Pay Millions to an Accuser?"

I saw him become passionate only once, when he defended earmarks — the special projects such as Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” that members dropped at the last minute into conference reports, deliberately leaving no time to debate or amend them....

The [Sunlight Foundation] found that Hastert had used a secret trust to join with others and invest in farm land near the proposed route of a new road called the Prairie Parkway. He then helped secure a $207 million earmark for the road. The land, approximately 138 acres, was bought for about $2.1 million in 2004 and later sold for almost $5 million, or a profit of 140 percent. Local land records and congressional disclosure forms never identified Hastert as the co-owner of any of the land in the trust. Hastert turned a $1.3 million investment (his portion of the land holdings) into a $1.8 million profit in less than two years. Hastert claimed at the time that the land deals had nothing to do with the federal earmark he had secured. “I owned land and I sold it, like millions of people do every day,” he told the Washington Post. Or, as George Washington Plunkitt, the former Tammany Hall leader in New York, once said of someone who made a killing in local land that later became part of a lucrative subway development: “He saw his opportunities and he took ’em.” Plunkitt called such “opportunities” a form of “honest graft.”...

ADDED: But getting that money isn't the crime Hastert is charged with. Nor is conveying that money to a person who accused him of wrongdoing. Lawprof Noah Feldman describes the conduct the government cites in its charges (I've added some boldface):

First, [Hastert] made 15 withdrawals of $50,000 each from his own accounts. The withdrawals were not criminal, but they did trigger a federal law that requires a bank to report any transaction or series of transactions of more than $10,000. In April 2012, according to the indictment, bank officials questioned Hastert about the withdrawals.

Presumably, in those conversations or in conjunction with them, Hastert realized for the first time that he shouldn't be making withdrawals of more than $10,000 if he didn't want to trigger scrutiny. Beginning in July 2012, Hastert switched his withdrawals so that they were less than $10,000 each -- to a total of $952,000. That was a crime under the law that prohibits knowingly structuring transactions to avoid reporting. And it's a crime that seems easy to prove, given Hastert’s change in his withdrawal practices.

Unfortunately for Hastert, when the FBI and IRS questioned him about the structure of the transactions in December 2014, he lied to them, insisting that he “did not feel safe in the banking system.” When asked directly what he did with the money, he said, “Yeah, I kept the cash. ... That's what I'm doing.” The lie to federal officials was a crime, too.

All of that is easy to prove, but we might nevertheless wonder whether the choice to prosecute is really based on the alleged wrong that Hastert spent so much money to hush up. Feldman asks why the government keeping things hushed up too and observes that if the underlying accusation is false and Hastert "was being blackmailed unjustly, then the government's prosecution seems heartless to the point of being abusive." Feldman concludes: "we should know what happened or Hastert shouldn't be charged."

But that assumes that the crimes Hastert seems to have committed should go unprosecuted unless there's something else that that makes us want to convict him of something. I think what is abusive is to have crimes that we don't believe in enforcing that are sitting around only to be used on occasions when we have some other problem with a person!