CHICAGO — J. Dennis Hastert, the small-town wrestling coach who rose to political power as the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House, indicated in U.S. District Court on Thursday that he would plead guilty as part of a plea agreement in a case where he is accused of skirting banking laws and lying to the federal investigators.
A federal prosecutor told the court that the government expects a written plea agreement to be given to the judge Monday and have asked for a hearing on Oct. 28, at which Hastert is expected to change his plea to guilty from not guilty.
It was unclear what charges that Hastert would plead guilty to and what the sentence may be.
Hastert, 73, was charged in May with structuring cash withdrawals, totaling $1.7 million, in a manner intended to avoid detection by banking officials, and then lying about the withdrawals to the federal authorities. The seven-page indictment laid out a pattern of clandestine meetings and bank withdrawals. Eventually, Hastert was questioned by federal agents.
Although the indictment did not say what the withdrawals were for, subsequent reports, citing unidentified government sources, said that they were "hush money" to cover up allegations of sexual misconduct with a male student during Hastert's time as a high school teacher and coach in Yorkville, Illinois, about 50 miles southwest of Chicago. Hastert has not been charged with any sex crimes, and the identity of the person he is accused of paying remains unknown.
The plea will allow Hastert, who presided over the House from 1999 to 2007, to avoid a potentially long and embarrassing trial and to keep secret information that he has hidden for years, including the identity of the former student, called Individual A in the indictment. It was that man who, around 2010, met with the former speaker several times to discuss "past misconduct" by Hastert while he was teaching in Yorkville, the indictment said. Hastert taught there from 1965 to 1981.
During one meeting, Hastert agreed to pay his former student $3.5 million to "compensate for and conceal" his misconduct, the indictment said. Soon after, it continued, Hastert began taking out large sums of money from several accounts and paying Individual A in amounts of $50,000 or $100,000.
After banking officials asked Hastert to explain the withdrawals, he changed course, taking out cash in increments of less than $10,000 in an attempt to evade detection, the indictment said. Banks are required to report cash withdrawals of more than $10,000. In December, under questioning from federal agents, Hastert said that he was holding onto the cash out of mistrust of the banking system.
"Yeah," Hastert told the agents, the indictment said. "I kept the cash. That's what I'm doing."
Hastert was first elected to Congress in 1986, and in 1999, he became speaker of the House after Newt Gingrich abruptly stepped down. Hastert, an easygoing and popular figure who was known on Capitol Hill as "the coach," was adept at corralling members of his caucus and pushing the Republican agenda. He did not seek re-election in 2008.
After leaving Congress, Hastert parlayed his time as speaker into a lucrative career, starting a lobbying firm and later working at the Washington law firm Dickstein Shapiro. After the indictment in May, as his former colleagues in Washington expressed astonishment at the charges, he resigned and has stayed out of public view.
Hastert appeared at the courthouse in Chicago in June and initially pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Last month, lawyers for the prosecution and for Hastert said in federal court that they were discussing a plea agreement and asked the judge, Thomas M. Durkin of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, for more time to file pretrial motions. Legal experts said that given the nature of the charges and the evidence laid out in the indictment, it appeared likely that Hastert would pursue a plea deal rather than endure a trial.
Pretrial motions were due Tuesday, a deadline that passed without the submission of pretrial paperwork, an indication that Hastert and the prosecutors were nearing a plea deal.
Hastert's lawyer, Thomas C. Green, has accused prosecutors of leaking details of the case, saying that revelations of sexual abuse jeopardized Hastert's ability to receive a fair trial. At a hearing in July, Green called the anonymously sourced reports of sexual abuse the "800-pound gorilla" in the room.