Thread by @soychicka

Oh, look who kept most of his money at Bear Stearns:

Denny Hastert.

Interesting that he didn't get the Bear Stearns account until he became Speaker, though - isn't it?

He sold the farm and 'bought into' Bear Stearns right around the same time.

2000.

The year there were allegations he was getting duffel bags of cash from Turks.

And the same year Nader was just charged with trafficking a 14 year old boy.

And the year before 9/11.
Huh.

Weird, though - he sold off most of his Bear Stearns fund in 2005...

That remaining $50-100K investment is totally gone - no transactions that seem relevant...

And in its stead is a $1,000,000 - $5,000,000 holding(?) in North Star Trust Co., labeled "dissolved escrow."

Escrow from what, I wonder...

Somebody needs to go through these disclosures for some tighter forensic analysis; the value categories they have makes it impossible to tell where $ is moving around to, even to get a range tighter than $1.5 - 6.3M for 2004...

which is a very interesting year, btw.

There were also lots of 'improvements' made to his home property (conveniently not listed, as you can skip listing properties that are 'residences' in these disclosure forms) during from 99-when they moved to Plano time frame (personal recollection).

I have a feeling that this is about to get much more interesting to many more people, though, so if you do this kind of thing for fun or profit, take a look at the full set of records.

opensecrets.org/personal-finan…

Glad to see he did list his guest house, as a source of income, though - I remember during 1985, at least, he rented it to a single mother with a 5yo boy...

at least during 1996, the only year it shows income listed.

I guess he stopped renting it after his son graduated.