Evangelist Who Counseled Saddam Says Hastert Promises to Resign

News: Eccentric preacher K.A. Paul says when he met with Dennis Hastert yesterday, God convinced the speaker to step down over the Foley scandal. But the real question is: Why did the speaker even take the meeting

By Josh Harkinson

October 11, 2006

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On Tuesday morning, an unusual guest emerged from House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s home in Plano, Ill.: Globetrotting evangelical minister K.A. Paul, who proceeded to tell the Associated Press that he’d talked and prayed with the speaker about the Foley affair. That Hastert would reach out to a preacher best known for hobnobbing with the likes of Saddam Hussein, Liberia’s Charles Taylor, and Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide, might have seemed bizarre enough. But reached at his home Tuesday evening, Paul told Mother Jones an even more peculiar story: that he’d convinced the Speaker to resign.

“God convinced him through me in prayer,” said Paul, who knows a few things about scandals, having faced controversy for allegedly claiming another minister’s work as his own, neglecting orphans in the United States, and interfering with a murder investigation in India. “God gave me this position that I don’t deserve,” he claims Speaker Hastert told him. “For the good of the people, I will do it.”

Hastert’s office couldn’t be reached Tuesday evening; the speaker’s staff confirmed to the AP that the meeting took place, but wouldn’t comment on what transpired.

It’s not clear why Hastert decided to meet with Paul, whose Gospel for the Unreached Millions, the AP dryly noted, lost its membership in the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability last year “when the group failed to provide information about the use of its resources.” To be sure, over the years, Paul has cultivated many prominent Republican supporters: Dallas millionaire Nelson Bunker Hunt served on the board of his charity, Global Peace Initiative (which is separate from Gospel for the Unreached Millions), and prominent Republican donor Carl Lindner Jr. has given his organization millions. Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee once hosted a party for Paul’s associates at the governor’s mansion. Promise Keepers founder Bill McCartney and boxer Evander Holyfield have also reportedly championed his causes.

Born Anand Kilari in India’s impoverished Andhra Pradesh, Paul boasts that he convinced Liberian ex-dictator Charles Taylor to resign his office; he claims to have ministered to Saddam Hussein, Muammar al-Khaddafi, and Slobodan Milosevic, and to have known al-Qaeda’s Abu Musab al-Zarqawi “when he was nobody.” His sermons in Africa and India reportedly draw millions. More recently, Paul has been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. “We don’t need unnecessary stupid Iraq wars anymore,” he said, “because we are losing reputation and spoiling the good name of Christ and Americans.”

Paul said he decided to seek an audience with Hastert because the Foley scandal is distracting America from more pressing problems such as alleviating global poverty. And so, on Monday morning he sent his “international secretary general,” Dennis Ryan, to track down Hastert in his hometown of Plano, Ill. After stopping by the Speaker’s house, Ryan found Hastert at a local Italian restaurant and connected him with Paul via cell phone; in short order, Paul says, Hastert agreed to meet him at 7:00 a.m. the next day.

The evangelist showed up Tuesday morning, half an hour late with his trademark entourage of Third World orphans, and promptly told the Speaker that “God has a very special plan for this meeting.” The two men withdrew into a private room where, Paul says, he launched into a sermon about what Hastert should do. Paul told Mother Jones that he cited politicians whose reputations suffered when they resisted stepping down: Donald Rumsfeld, Tom DeLay, Bill Clinton. “I said ‘If you don’t do that, the Republicans will lose control of the Congress, you will no longer be Speaker in 30 days, and at the same time they will all blame you because of the Foley scandal. You want that for you? You want that to be your life legacy after accomplishing so many good things?’ So that’s what convinced him.”

Hastert pledged to resign, Paul says, at which point he prayed for the Speaker. The prayer, as Paul recalls it, went like this: “Lord, give him wisdom, direction, understanding, knowledge, guidance during this time of crisis and thank you for inspiring him to do the right thing. To put the people and the country before himself. Bless him and his family, anoint him and thank the Lord for his simplicity and humility. Give him good health.”

Paul says he came away much more impressed with Hastert than with DeLay, whom he also claims to have counseled. “There is no comparison between,” he said. “Tom DeLay and Speaker Hastert: Pride vs humility. Opposites.”

Inspired by the humility of Mother Theresa and Gandhi, Paul says that he lives in a $160,000 house, sleeps on a $100 bed, and gets by with a $10 table and $5 chair—“Goodwill stuff”—all so he can donate more resources to finding homes for orphans. He claims to have rescued 310,000 of them.

There are suggestions, though, that Paul’s humility has its limits. This past June, a story in the Houston Press, the alternative weekly in Paul’s hometown (and my employer at the time), drew attention to a Boeing 747, named Global Peace One, that Paul has used to fly around the globe. The plane has racked up a string of unpaid maintenance fees around the world and is the subject of a lawsuit filed against Paul in Los Angeles Superior Court by the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces, a group that claims that Paul’s group took $850,000 of its money in exchange for a promise—never fulfilled—to fly them to a Holocaust commemoration in Israel. When a Houston Press reporter questioned Paul about how he justified owning the costly jet, the evangelist shot back, “It’s the organization owns it, you chicken!” Paul is also accused of abandoning an orphan after checking her into a U.S. hospital, claiming a different minister’s leper colony as his own, and deserting nine American missionaries in an Indian prison where they were taken after participating in an unpermitted religious rally he had organized. In 1999, the National Council of Churches in India issued a warning on Paul, writing that “Chuches and missions are advised not to associate with his activities.”

For the time being, Paul has grounded the 747 in favor of a used, $10,000 van that he plans to drive, orphans in tow, to 21 battleground states in an effort to influence the November election. He will meet with “many leaders,” he said, and preach whenever he can: “I would love to see Congress tilted.”

Josh Harkinson is a Mother Jones investigative fellow.

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