Jack Shafer (Slate‘s Pressbox) points to this statement from Hastert on an Aug. 23 radio show:
Brian Lehrer: What do you think of the Swift Boat veterans ads, and John Kerry’s calls for the president to denounce them?
Dennis Hastert: Well, you find out that if you look into the record, I was against the Campaign Finance Reform Act because that’s what I felt that would happen, that you would push into guys like George Soros, who’s dumping in $16 or $20 million. We don’t know where that money comes from. We don’t know where it comes from, from the left, and you don’t know where it comes in the right. You know, Soros’ money, some of that is coming from overseas. It could be drug money. We don’t know where it comes from.
This is further evidence (if you need more) that Hastert’s recent, just slightly more ambiguous statement that “I don’t know where George Soros gets his money[;] I don’t know where — if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from” is indeed an allegation that Soros was getting money from drug criminals, rather than from pro-drug-legalization groups. If Hastert has evidence that Soros is indeed getting drug money, then by all means he should present it, and quickly. If he doesn’t, then, as I originally said, this is a smear, and deserves to be strongly condemned.
Those who are tempted to come to Hastert’s defense by saying that he was just giving a hypothetical example — “I’m not saying he is getting this money, I’m just saying we can’t know” — should ask themselves what they’d think about (the purely hypothetical case of) some Democratic politician’s saying “I don’t know where Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are getting their money, if it comes from overseas or from neo-Nazis.”
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