I'm afraid I'm with Dennis Hastert on this one

Long ago, the Supreme Court ruled that turning around to avoid a police checkpoint was not probable cause for the police to chase you down and arrest you.

You'd think that the same principle would apply to withdrawing money from the bank. If you withdraw over ten thousand dollars, bank officials will question you about it. So Dennis Hastert quit withdrawing more than ten thousand dollars at a time. So the FBI questioned him for THAT.

I'm not sure why it was their business, but they questioned him and he told them he took it out because he didn't trust banks.

So now they've charged him with lying to the FBI because he was actually paying off a blackmailer. I guess it was blackmail. They agreed to the amount he would pay to compensate the person for something Hastert once did to them and they agreed to keep it all confidential. Is that really blackmail?

The two aren't mutually exclusive. You can not trust banks AND pay off a blackmailer.

I'm a little curious about what Hastert was paying $3.5 million to conceal. It must have been bad, whatever it was. And the so-called blackmailer lived in the town where Hastert had been a teacher and wrestling coach. So what could a coach or a teacher have done that would be so shameful that he'd be willing to pay millions to keep it quiet? What could it possibly be?

And another thing, where would an ex-teacher and ex-wrestling coach get three and a half million dollars?

But I'm afraid I'm with Hastert on this one. Intentionally not violating banking regulations is not a violation of banking regulations and if the FBI says he lied, they better have it on tape. It was recently revealed that FBI "experts" perjured themselves in hundreds of cases:

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

Of 28 examiners with the FBI Laboratory’s microscopic hair comparison unit, 26 overstated forensic matches in ways that favored prosecutors in more than 95 percent of the 268 trials reviewed so far, according to the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the Innocence Project, which are assisting the government with the country’s largest post-conviction review of questioned forensic evidence.

The cases include those of 32 defendants sentenced to death. Of those, 14 have been executed or died in prison, the groups said under an agreement with the government to release results after the review of the first 200 convictions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-forensic-hair-matches-in-nearly-all-criminal-trials-for-decades/2015/04/18/39c8d8c6-e515-11e4-b510-962fcfabc310_story.html

If they'd lie to get an innocent person executed, you don't think they lie about Dennis Hastert, who apparently did something so monstrous that he agreed to pay his victim millions?