I'll admit to feeling a bit sorry for Hastert. Don't quite know where on the inappropriate<->criminal scale his actions fell (the "sexual abuse," not the structuring and lying), but at least at the moment it sounds more like hush money than "keep myself out of jail" money. Anyway, I feel sorry because if my perception of events is in the ballpark, then it's really pretty sad that it was worth it to him to pay that much money to essentially hide the fact that he had, or wanted to have, sex with men. A life in the closet is hard.
These subjects get a bit tricky because it was apparently a teacher-student relationship, which is of course at the very least highly inappropriate (not familiar with relevant criminal statutes that were operative at the time), but that doesn't make him a pedophile.
