Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay has written to a federal judge asking for leniency for ex-Speaker Dennis Hastert, the Republican politician who pled guilty last year to illegally structuring bank withdrawals as part of what prosecutors now say was a scheme to pay off a former student whom he had allegedly molested during his days as a high school wrestling coach. Prosecutors say that Hastert sexually abused at least four boys.
The former GOP leader has acknowledged that he “committed transgressions for which he is profoundly sorry.”
In a letter to the judge who will be sentencing Hastert in the banking violation case, DeLay defended Hastert as a good, godly man with very few flaws and who “doesn’t deserve what he is going through.”
Although DeLay's letter is undated, the Chicago Tribune notes that most of the letters in support of Hastert were “written in late February and early March — before prosecutors detailed sex abuse allegations against Hastert from decades ago.” Although prosecutors only recently laid out the new charges against Hastert, the allegations of child abuse were widely reported in May of last year.
But while Tom Delay may not think that Dennis Hastert deserves the public shame of being called a child abuser, he doesn’t feel the same way about LGBT people. After all, this is the same Tom DeLay who has demonized LGBT people by grouping them with pedophiles.
Just days after the Supreme Court delivered its landmark marriage equality decision, DeLay claimed that he knew of “a secret memo coming out of the Justice Department” that would legalize “12 new perversions,” including “having sexual with little boys.”
