Donald Trump, as President or ex-President, was first in many things, and some of them not very exemplary. Now he has broken another record, becoming the first former White House tenant to be charged. But he’s not the only US head of state to have had trouble with the law throughout history: a handful of presidents or vice presidents have been involved in political trials or have been linked to crimes.
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A grand jury in New York has voted to indict the former president and current presidential nominee for paying $130,000 paid by then-Trump attorney Michael Cohen in connection with the case being pursued by Manhattan prosecutors to buy the silence of porn actress Stormy Daniels just ahead of the election that would make the real estate tycoon President of the United States in 2016.
The first American President to be impeached was Andrew Johnson (1865-1869). In his case, not because there were doubts about his reputation as a good citizen, but for purely political reasons: his tenure was marked by constant confrontation with Congress over his post-Civil War (1861-1865) reconstruction efforts. Johnson, a Southern Democrat from Tennessee, had allowed the breakaway states to quickly rejoin the Union. He had pardoned Confederate soldiers. And he vetoed bills passed by Congress to protect the rights of newly freed slaves. He fired his Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who spoke out against his goodwill toward the former Confederate states.
The disputes reached their climax in 1868: the House of Representatives opened the impeachment process. The blood did not reach the river. Although the House of Commons concluded that he should be removed, the Senate acquitted him. But Johnson didn’t want to run for a second term.
His successor, Ulysses Grant (1869-1877), had a different kind of problem: when he rode his horse-drawn carriage, he liked to run. He was once pulled over for speeding, but police let him go after being handed a single fine.
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It would take almost a century to achieve the biggest and most famous scandal in American politics to date: the Watergate that cost Richard Nixon his job (1969-1974). The Republican president, who claimed “I’m not a criminal,” resigned in 1974 before an impeachment trial began against him. Although a grand jury named him as a participant in the case, charges were never brought against him and his successor in the White House, former Vice President Gerald Ford, pardoned him.
The case, which was made into the film All the President’s Men starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, broke out after members of Nixon’s reelection committee raided the Democratic Party’s headquarters at the offices of the Watergate complex on the Potomac River to install listening devices and steal documents. The mics didn’t work so five of them went back to swap them out. That’s when they were discovered.
At first, Nixon wanted to cover up his involvement until he fired the independent special prosecutor investigating the case. The scandal was taken to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the President should release the transcripts of all their conversations. These ties entangled him.
Nixon’s tenure was also peppered with other political scandals. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in 1973 after accepting charges of tax evasion. The charges were part of a larger investigation into alleged bribes he received during his tenure in local government in the state of Maryland, where he rose to become governor.
But if the case of the Republican president restoring diplomatic ties with Mao Zedong’s China marked a before and after in contemporary US politics, it was that of Democrat Bill Clinton (1993-2001), the biggest sex scandal in American history Politics, no case less media.
In 1998, the House of Representatives indicted Clinton for perjury and obstruction of justice after the president attempted to cover up his relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, then 24. As 130 years ago, the case failed and the President was acquitted by the Senate. But the impeachment process and the attendant attrition of the president’s popularity meant that his second term was that of a discredited leader unable to carry out ambitious projects.
Clinton’s troubles had begun in Arkansas, the state where he was governor, where he had raised suspicions for his involvement in the Whitewater real estate hit. A civil servant, Paula Jones, had sued him for sexual harassment. The Democrat was the first president to testify in self-defense before a jury.
As part of the case, investigators called the ex-fellow to testify about her relationship with the president. On January 26, 1998, Clinton uttered one of the phrases that would mark his presidency: “I had no sexual relations with this woman, Miss Lewinsky.” had oral sex, had committed perjury by denying the affair and whether he was obstructing justice by encouraging the girl to deny the relationship.
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