... on his campaign contributions to determine if his voting was in effect a result of a bribe from Turks who were looking to stop the vote on the Armenian Genocide... A lot of this is already known from Sibel Edmonds' Vanity Fair article, but there are a few other added points that Harut Sassounian of The California Courier makes that should be checked out and corroborated by others. He notes at the end that this is not a Turkish/Armenian thing, but a question of American government corruption. I might disagree with him on other issues, but I agree here. And the Armenian community probably has a lot of detailed records of what happened for this vote that we should leverage to help arrive at what happened then, to determine if Hastert is "for sale", and whether something should be done about it.
From:
http://www.azg.am/?lang=EN&num=2005090601SPEAKER HASTERT SHOULD COME CLEAN BY DISCLOSING ALL CONTRIBUTIONSSeveral important developments have taken place since Vanity Fair magazine reported that a Turkish diplomat had talked about arranging for $500,000 in small, un-itemized contributions of less than $200 each to House Speaker Dennis Hastert in order to block a congressional resolution on the Armenian Genocide in Fall 2000.
A watchdog Group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Government, filed a complaint on August 16 urging federal officials to investigate whether Speaker Hastert's campaign did indeed illegally accept campaign contributions from foreign nationals.
According to Vanity Fair, the FBI had wiretapped several Turkish subjects in the United States who had discussed arranging for tens of thousands of dollars to be paid to Hastert's campaign funds in small checks.
Sibel Edmonds, a Turkish translator working for the FBI, was asked by her superiors to review more than 40 recorded conversations of a senior official at the Turkish Consulate in Chicago as well as members of the American-Turkish Council (ATC) and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations (ATAA) in Washington, D.C., according to Vanity Fair.
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