Former US House of Representatives leader Dennis Hastert dies

The former chairman of the US House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, is dead. He died of natural causes over the weekend, said Kendall County in the US state of Illinois. Hastert was 84 years old.

From 1999 to 2007, the Republican was head of the second chamber of Congress and was therefore formally the third most powerful politician in the USA. Hastert gained notoriety primarily through judicial scandals, including a hush-money affair in connection with sexual abuse, in which he was sentenced to 15 months in prison in 2016.

He had previously pleaded guilty to having withdrawn around 1.7 million dollars (1.5 million euros), some of them illegally, over almost five years and paying them to previous victims. He also admitted to molesting several teenage boys during his time coaching youth wrestlers. According to the public prosecutor's office, Hastert is also said to have abused boys in his previous job as a teacher, but the crimes were time-barred at the time of the verdict.

“What I did was wrong,” Hastert said at the time. He was exposed after regularly withdrawing large amounts of money from his accounts. Several weeks before the scheduled end of his sentence, he was allowed to leave the prison hospital where he was staying at the time.

There had already been calls for Hastert's resignation in 2006 following an affair involving his party colleague Mark Foley. Foley had sent sexual messages to so-called congressional pages, underage messengers and assistants in the US Congress. Critics then accused Hastert of not acting early enough and of covering up for his colleague.

The politician ultimately gave up the presidency of the House of Representatives because the Democrats had regained the majority. A little later he also withdrew from Congress and worked, among other things, as a highly paid lobbyist.