Former House Speaker Dennis Hastert Dies at 84 in Illinois

Dennis Hastert, who led the U.S. House of Representatives longer than any other Republican speaker before his career collapsed in scandal, has died at 84. He died Saturday of natural causes at his Illinois home, where he was receiving hospice care, according to Kendall County Coroner Jacquie Purcell, the Associated Press reported Monday.

Hastert, a former high school history teacher and wrestling coach from Illinois, served in Congress for two decades and held the speaker’s gavel from 1999 to 2007. Elevated after Newt Gingrich stepped aside, he took the post having never held a top leadership job, and in his first weeks presided over the House while the Senate tried President Bill Clinton following his impeachment. Working with President George W. Bush, he helped steer major tax cuts and a large expansion of Medicare prescription drug coverage through the chamber.

A legacy overtaken by a hush-money case

That record was overtaken a decade ago, when federal prosecutors charged Hastert with breaking banking laws as he withdrew cash tied to $3.5 million in payments to a man identified in court only as "Individual A." Prosecutors later alleged the payments were meant to keep quiet sexual abuse of teenage boys on the wrestling team Hastert coached at Yorkville High School, west of Chicago, where he worked from 1965 to 1981. Federal prosecutors alleged at least four boys were abused; Hastert was never charged with a sex crime because the statute of limitations had expired, according to the AP.

He pleaded guilty to the banking charge and acknowledged at his April 2016 sentencing that he had mistreated some of the wrestlers he coached. Sentenced to 15 months, he served about 13 months in federal prison — among the highest-ranking American politicians ever sent to prison. He left Congress in 2007 after Democrats retook the House, and later worked as a Washington lobbyist. Institutions that once honored him, including Wheaton College and the House itself, removed his name and portrait in the years after the case.

Reporting based on coverage by the Associated Press and CNN.