Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert has enjoyed his last few minutes of freedom and reported to prison. Phil Rogers reports.
Nearly a month has passed since Dennis Hastert left the Minnesota prison where he lived for more than a year.
But Wednesday, the former U.S. House speaker has officially left the custody of the Bureau of Prisons and will now begin two years under court supervision, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting.
Since July 17, Hastert has lived under the purview of a residential re-entry management field office in Chicago, according to the BOP.
Before that, he served roughly 85 percent of a 15-month sentence at the Rochester Federal Medical Center in southeast Minnesota.
Hastert’s attorney chose not to comment Tuesday. He has previously declined to say whether Hastert has been living in a halfway house or on home confinement. However, a Lake County Sheriff’s office spokesman said Hastert visited the department to be placed on electronic monitoring after he left prison.
The former speaker’s legal troubles aren’t over. He still faces two lawsuits in Kendall County related to the lurid allegations against him. A lawyer for the men suing Hastert has said she wants to depose him.
When he sentenced Hastert to 15 months in prison, U.S. District Judge Thomas M. Durkin also ordered him to spend two years on supervised release. That begins once the BOP finishes with Hastert on Wednesday.
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The judge gave the former speaker three days following his release from the prison system to report to a probation office. He told Hastert not to contact his victims while on supervised release, and he ordered Hastert to participate in a sex offender treatment program.
Hastert went to prison for crimes he committed while trying to hide his past sexual abuse of teenage boys. Authorities could not prosecute him for that abuse because the statutes of limitations had long run out. Instead, the feds hit Hastert in May 2015 with a seven-page indictment accusing him of illegally structuring bank withdrawals and lying to the FBI.
Hastert pleaded guilty to the structuring in October 2015. During his sentencing hearing in April 2016, he admitted to the judge that he sexually abused children in the 1970s while he was a wrestling coach at Yorkville High School.
