How to corrupt Hastert

Part 3 of my interview with Larisa Alexandrovna is here

here's a taste:

"Lukery: How does it happen? One of my readers noted that the bribes to Hastert go back at least to the 96 election cycle - before Hastert had any real power - and he wondered why Hastert would be targeted by these criminals when he was essentially a nobody...

LA: Well - this game is so complicated. For example, take a nobody like Curt Weldon - who by all accounts is a very nice man who I had respect for, once. He's a little bit eccentric and loopy but is generally a nice man - and then out of nowhere this nice, generally loopy, kinda goofy guy is somehow introduced to Ghorbanifar - an Iranian arms dealer who literally cannot come into this country, is exiled from his own country, who the CIA has burn notices against, and who was involved in Iran Contra. Now - how do these two people come together? Who woke up one morning and thought - ya know - those two people should meet? What jarred this? I mean, what was the reasoning behind this? ( I don’t think in Weldon's case he's being bribed or anything -I don't have anything on him doing anything illegal as far as I can tell he's an upstanding kinda guy but I do think he's being manipulated. )

Or take another example, a decorated Vietnam veteran like Duke Cunningham - who seems like a normal person, nice guy - one day he's approached, soon he's being bought off by Wilkes and his operatives in the various agencies - and all of a sudden he has all this money.

Lukery: OK - but if we go back to Hastert in 1996 - when he's basically a nobody...

LA: Look - if you're already at the top, chances are you're already either owned by something or somebody – as the Hastert allegations show - or you're not buyable - as in Feingold's case. You're just not for sale - so they just leave you alone.

So of course they're going to go after the available, pliable ones. In fact, if you look at how CIA officers are trained, they're trained to provide a pitch of sorts to identify the weakest, and have them turn against their own country. So one would think that foreign assets are quite capable of doing the same thing.

Lukery: OK - so they got Hastert in their pocket early - and presumably they had a few others as backup. It puts Hastert's ascension into the Speakership in an interesting light - as well as the motivations of the kingmakers.

LA: Well, I'm not sure about the actual mechanisms. But consider now that Duke has gone down and Wilkes is still operational - because apparently he's too important to go down - well, who's going to replace Duke? Do they start grooming others as soon as the allegations start surfacing? Are they grooming just one? More than one? Did they already have several people as backup? I just don't know."