Former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert, serves as a foreign agent for the Turkish government to lobby against the Armenian Genocide Resolution while spending over $40,000 a month of U.S. taxpayers money on office space, staff, cell phones and a leased SUV, as reported by Politico; a political journalism organization based in Arlington, Virginia, and highlighted by the Armenian Council of America.

Politico quotes Kenneth Gross, a former Federal Election Commission general counsel and congressional ethics authority, that sort of separation is hard to maintain. Hastert “has to be meticulous in his schedule to make sure there is no bleed from his publicly subsidized office into his private practice.”

Steve Ellis, vice president of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense, called the arrangement “really concerning.”

“It is specifically prohibited — federal dollars can’t be spent on lobbying operations,” Ellis said. "We are paying for his staff [and] for a car, and we need to be very sure that he isn’t spending a dime of that money on lobbying operations.

Hastert declined to discuss the situation.

T.P.