Hastert to Plead Guilty of Sexual Abuse

Hastert to Plead Guilty of Sexual Abuse,

Yet US Still Covers up Turkish Blackmail

By Harut Sassounian

Publisher, The California Courier

www.TheCaliforniaCourier.com

This week, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert is expected to plead guilty to the charge of making secret payments to buy the silence of boys he had sexually abused when he was a high school wrestling coach. This plea deal with federal prosecutors would seal his court records, thus hiding from the public the details of the evidence against him.

Ever since 2005 when former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds exposed corruption at the highest levels of the US government, concerned citizens have been waiting impatiently for law enforcement officials to look into her shocking revelations.

Given the regrettably long silence by Washington and the mainstream US media, I believe it is time to expose once again the scandalous cover up of the claims that Turkish groups had bribed Speaker Hastert.

Philip Giraldi, former CIA officer and Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, published in The American Conservative last week the sinister details of foreign governments blackmailing Speaker Hastert.

 

Edmonds was fired from her FBI position after revealing to her superiors the penetration of US government entities by Turkish agents “who were seeking to influence U.S. foreign policy while sometimes engaging in illegal activity,” according to Giraldi. “The scope of the corruption allegedly involved bribery of senior government officials and congressmen, arranging for export licenses to countries that were embargoed, and the exposure of classified information,” Giraldi wrote.

In a 2009 deposition, Edmonds explained that Hastert was “one of the primary U.S. persons involved in operations and activities that are not legal, and they’re not for the interest of the United States but for the interest of foreign governments and foreign entities.” She described Hastert’s wrongdoing as: “The acceptance of large sums of bribery in forms of cash or laundered cash and laundering it to make it look legal for his campaigns, and also for his personal use, in order to do certain favors and call certain -- call for certain actions, make certain things happen for foreign entities and foreign governments’ interests, Turkish government’s interest and Turkish business entities’ interests.”

During the deposition, Edmonds was asked: “Did you have reason to believe that Mr. Hastert, for example, killed one of the Armenian genocide resolutions in exchange for money from these Turkish organizations?” She responded: “Yes, I do…. Correct… and not only taking money, but other activities, too, including being blackmailed for various reasons.” After retiring from the House of Representatives, Hastert worked for the Washington firm of Dickstein Shapiro as a registered lobbyist for Turkey.

Edmonds also revealed during her deposition that Hastert “used the townhouse [in Chicago] that was not his residence for certain not very morally accepted activities. Now, whether that was being used as blackmail I don’t know, but the fact that foreign entities knew about this, in fact, they sometimes participated in some of those not maybe morally well activities in that particular townhouse that was supposed to be an office, not a house, residence, at certain hours, certain days, evenings of the week. So I can’t say if that was used as blackmail or not, but certain activities they would share. They were known.”

Edmonds told congressional investigators that on FBI phone recordings Turkish individuals boasted of their secret relationship with Hastert. “They discussed giving him tens of thousands of dollars in clandestine payments in exchange for political favors and information. Many of the transcripts involved a suspect at the city’s Turkish Consulate, as well as several members of the American-Turkish Council and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations, business entities that some FBI agents believed served as occasional covers for organized crime. Some calls appeared to be referring to drug shipments and other possible crimes,” Giraldi wrote.

“Edmonds noted that the phone taps contained repeated references to Hastert’s volte face [change of position] in the fall of 2000 over the campaign to have Congress designate the killings of Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 a genocide. In August 2000, Speaker Hastert declared that he would support the resolution and send it to the full House for a vote. The resolution, vehemently opposed by the Turks, did indeed pass in the International Relations Committee by a large majority. Then, on October 19, shortly before a full House vote, Hastert withdrew it…. A senior official at the Turkish Consulate indicated in one recorded conversation that the “price for convincing Hastert to withdraw the genocide resolution would be at least $500,000,” Giraldi reported in his article.

Fifteen years later, the American public is still waiting for the US government to investigate the serious allegations of Turkish bribery and blackmail of Speaker Hastert!

H.S.

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Notes E&O: for further lecture on Hastert case see also

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2015/10/19/the-peoples-campaign-the-real-hastert-case-all-in-one-place/

Aliyev Named Corruption's 'Person Of The Year'

Azerbaijani President Aliyev
Named Corruption's 'Person Of The Year'

January 2, 2013 - 5:21pm, by Robert Coalson 
A EurasiaNet Partner Post from: RFE/RL
 

In 2012, corruption watchdog Transparency International reported that two-thirds of the world's countries may be considered "highly corrupt." It would seem tough to choose someone for the dubious honor of corruption's "person of the year."

One investigative-journalism NGO has done just that.

The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), based in Sarajevo and Bucharest, has awarded the crown to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev.

The group, which specializes in reporting on corruption in the region stretching from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, also gave out some "honorable" mentions. They went to alleged Kosovo-born cigarette and drugs smuggler Naser Kelmendi, Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic, Russian President Vladimir Putin, politically connected Serbian entrepreneur Miroslav Miskovic, longtime Uzbek President Islam Karimov, and wanted Serbian drugs smuggler Darko Saric.

The informal list was determined by representatives of the 15 international media organizations that make up the OCCRP. It is aimed at highlighting the intrepid and often courageous reporting that is needed to expose corruption in these notoriously opaque countries.

The OCCRP gave the nod to Aliyev, citing extensive reports and "well-documented evidence" that "the Aliyev family has been systematically grabbing shares of the most profitable businesses" in Azerbaijan for many years.

Secret Ownership Stakes

The reports include secret ownership stakes in banks, construction firms, gold mines, and telecommunications firms. Many of the reports about Aliyev were investigated by OCCRP affiliate Khadija Ismayilova, a journalist with RFE/RL's Azerbaijani Service.

"President Aliyev and his family, in fact, along with other persons in his inner circle are involved in so many secret businesses that we uncovered, actually together with Radio Free Europe this year," says Paul Radu, OCCRP's executive director. "We identified hidden companies that were owned by the first family of Azerbaijan in Panama, for instance, or in the Czech Republic. And we identified assets that they owned back in Azerbaijan via these companies."

Radu is optimistic about the new tools that are making this kind of reporting more and more effective. One example he cites is that OCCRP has successfully partnered with a Scottish computer hacker.

"He works right now with us at the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and he is the one who scraped [eds: got into] the Panamanian registry of companies and that allowed us to perform name-based searches," Radu says. "And this is how we found the companies that are owned by the daughters of Aliyev and by his wife in Panama."

However, Radu adds that the impact of such reporting in the case of the Aliyev family has not been what one might hope.

The ownership structures of the family's foreign assets have been changed; the Azerbaijani parliament in June passed a law making it more difficult to discover who actually owns commercial companies and shielding Aliyev and his family from prosecution.

A Terrifying Campaign Of Threats

Moreover, journalist Ismayilova was subjected to a terrifying campaign of threats and harassment that she alleges was orchestrated by Aliyev's political allies.

Nevertheless, OCCRP editor Drew Sullivan says that "2012 was a banner year for those of us who cover organized crime and corruption. It is a growth industry around the world."

According to Radu, the OCCRP is now combining numerous international databases and linking them to the organization's ongoing files of "persons of interest" -- future candidates to unseat Aliyev as "person of the year."

The OCCRP list is also intended to highlight the global impact of crime and corruption. Radu maintains that most of the people on the OCCRP list have dubious and opaque ties far beyond the borders of their country.

"There are persons such as Darko Sadic, for instance, who is a well-known drug trafficker," he says. "And these sorts of persons are not well-known outside of the Balkans, but in fact they are part of very, very large networks that stretch sometimes across continents. In this case, this person was involved in cocaine trafficking from Argentina all the way to the Balkans."

Radu adds that organized crime from the Balkans and the former Soviet Union is deeply involved in the savage drug wars in Mexico and in massive resource theft from impoverished countries in Africa. This makes it all the more important to expose these people and the corrupt schemes they exploit, he says.