Ex-House Speaker Hastert leaves prison, must undergo sex-offender treatment
Dennis Hastert/Shutterstock.com
Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert has been released from a Minnesota prison where he served 13 months for structuring banking transactions to cover up his payment of hush money to a man who claimed he was sexually abused by the former politican.
Hastert, 75, has been moved to a halfway house and will have to serve two years of supervised release that will include taking part in a sex-offender treatment program, report the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune.
Hastert left prison Monday, prison officials said Tuesday. He will be released from federal custody on Aug. 16. It’s unclear if he will be allowed to move from the halfway house and serve the rest of his sentence on home confinement, according to the Tribune.
Hastert withdrew funds from banks to pay $1.7 million in hush money to a man who says Hastert abused him when he was a teenager and Hastert was a high school wrestling coach.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin had called Hastert a “serial child molester” when he sentenced him in April 2016.
Sex-offender treatment can include psychological and physiological testing, the Chicago Tribune explains. “Such evaluations can be rigorous and invasive,” the article reports. “One measure that’s been suggested for Hastert by a probation official is a polygraph exam to determine whether he’s lying about how many people he’s victimized and whether any abuse has occurred recently, court records show.”
