Outside Cable News

Via Newsday
Hastert’s Prairie Parkway push: Fox Eyes
by Mark Silva

The former speaker of the House, Republican Dennis Hastert, is among the subjects of a FOX News Channel examination of questionable “earmarks'’ in federal spending.

His earmark: the Prairie Parkway that runs near land he owned west of Chicago.

The FOX special investigative report, “Porked: Earmarks for Profit,” airs Saturday at 8 pm EDT. It is hosted by Chris Wallace with reporting by Gregg Jarrett.

The one-hour piece “exposes'’ congressmen “who have earmarked millions of taxpayer dollars on projects that they or their families have had financial interests in.,'’ Fox says in a promotional release. Hastert is “among those exposed in this documentary for his involvement with the Prairie Highway Project.'’

Expose may be a strong verb for a story that the Tribune reported two years ago.

Neverthelss, Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA) and Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-PA) also come in for some scrutiny in this FOX investigation.

A government watchdog long ago called for an official investigation to see if Hastert broke the law by pushing for federal funding of the highway project near land that he owned. Hastert (R-Ill.) and two partners turned a profit of more than $3 million last year on land they bought and sold near the proposed route of the Prairie Parkway. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington suggested that investors made money because of the federal highway funding that Hastert was pushing.

The group asked the Justice Department to investigate Hastert’s actions.

Tha was, uh, nearly a year and a half ago. And Hastert has since retired.

“It looks like Hastert may have broken the law,” Melanie Sloan, executive director of CRE, said back in 2006. “You are not allowed to use the legislative process purely for your own personal financial benefit, which is what appears to have happened here.”

When the Tribune initially reported the story that summer, Hastert spokesman Ron Bonjean said the speaker simply made a well-timed real estate investment on land three and five miles from the highway route.

“For 26 years, the speaker has been a proponent of the Prairie Parkway to address the transportation challenges in northeast Illinois,” Bonjean told the Tribune in June 2006. “None of the properties purchased by the speaker are near enough to the Prairie Parkway to be affected by the proposed highway.”

Since then, in the hope that Illinois doesn’t lose out on more than $9 billion in federal funds that have been earmarked for state transportation projects, Gov. Rod Blagojevich this year tapped two former congressmen to help pitch his $25 billion public works program.

One of them: Hastert.

Hastert, who retired from Congress after holding the speaker’s office longer than any Republican before him, and Glenn Poshard, Southern Illinois University president and a onetime Democratic candidate for governor, were tapped to co-chair the new Illinois Works Coalition earlier this year.

And oh, by the way, comes news today that Hastert has signed on with a Washington lobbying firm.

That should help.
“We need to recapture those federal dollars,” Hastert said in March when the governor formed the coalition. “We need to bring that back home … and the only way to do that is to get people together.”

Hastert said he sees no conflict of interest in helping the governor, even though his home and 127 surrounding acres near Plano happen to sit close to the proposed Prairie Parkway, the proposed project connecting Interstate Highways 90, 88 and 80 that he had championed in Congress.

“The property I had prior to this was closer to the interchange than the property I have now,” Hastert said in March. “I think it is kind of a moot question. I live there.”