Hastert demands "full retraction"; ABC says no

According to both the local NPR affiliate this morning and the ABC News web site, House Speaker Dennis Hastert's office has demanded that ABC News retract its claim (which I blogged on last night) that Hastert is the subject of a federal investigation:

Late Wednesday, ABC reported on its Web site that the Justice Department response was intended to deny that Hastert was a formal "target" or "subject" of the investigation. But ABC reported that federal officials confirmed that various members of Congress "including Hastert, are under investigation."

Hastert's office later issued a statement calling the ABC report "absolutely untrue" and demanding a full retraction.

Likewise, the Justice Department issued a new denial in response to the ABC late-evening update.

"With regard to reports suggesting that the Speaker of the House is under investigation or 'in the mix,' as stated by ABC News, I reconfirm, as stated by the Department earlier this evening, that these reports are untrue," Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty said in a statement issued shortly after midnight Thursday.

I found no retractions on the ABC News site, and NPR here reported this morning that ABC is standing behind its story from last night's evening news. And their chief investigative reporter is positive they got it right:

Law enforcement sources told ABC News that convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff has provided information to the FBI about Hastert and a number of other members of Congress that have broadened the scope of the investigation. Sources would not divulge details of the Abramoff’s information.

"You guys wrote the story very carefully but they are not reading it very carefully," a senior official said.

One gets a certain sense of what Yogi Berra famously referred to as "déjà vu all over again." The question uppermost in my mind is which storyline we're re-running. Is this going to be another Dan Rather-esque swift-boating-cum-kerning kerfuffle? Or is this going to be another Clinton-esque, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" tsimmes?

All the appearances of impropriety appear to be present. Jack Abramoff and his clients did give Hastert more than $100,000 in campaign contributions over several years. Abramoff did hold a fund-raiser for Hastert just before Hastert signed onto the letter to Interior secretary Gail Norton. ABC News was hardly the first news organization to report on the existence of the letter and Hastert's role in sending it to Norton--the Washington Post and others reported it nearly two years ago. And the casino that Hastert and his fellow congressional Republicans were worried would suffer if the Choctaw band were to build theirs was owned and operated by the Coushatta, who were clients of Abramoff's at the time.

Whether there was any actual impropriety is, of course, the $64,000 question. (And that figure is roughly the same as the amount of Abramoff contributions that Hastert donated--under pressure--to charity in January of this year.)

Ultimately, however, it may not matter. Politics is about nothing if not perception, and the mere perception of impropriety has been, if not necessarily the kiss of death, at least the harbinger of a nasty infection, in Illinois politics lately. (See Ryan, Jack; Ryan, George; Blagojevich, Rod; Daley, Richard M.; et aliae.) Republicans are not exactly the most popular people in this country--or this state--at the present juncture. Republicans in Congress have even lower approval ratings. Hastert does have the power of incumbency behind him, coupled with a nationally significant and prominent position, and a pork barrel full of largesse that's at least as big as he is. Whether those advantages will be enough to overcome the negatives that go hand in hand with being associated with slime like Abramoff and DeLay remains to be seen.

Comments

[Incertus]

I gotta say, if Hastert really is dirty, he's playing this right--get on the offense quick and try to smother it before it becomes a story. But ABC seems to feel like they know what they've got here. I'm worried that this is a ratfucking of ABC, discrediting them for when future stories come out.

[Michael]

Could be. That certainly seems to have been the spin they were putting on it at the few conservacon sites I happened across while Googling for links to write the piece.

But this is the second time in a year that Hastert's name has floated like a turd to the top of the cesspool in connection with allegations of impropriety. His "Prairie Parkway" idea for another ring road around the western suburbs of Chicago (a) isn't terribly popular in these parts, and (b) has more than a whiff of scandal about it, given that Hastert and a whole bunch of his Illinois Republican buddies just happen to have parcels of land along the proposed highway route.

I'm thinking we may be approaching the critical mass of scandal to bring Fat Denny down.