Donald Trump has made history so many times. The first president with no government or military experience. The first to be accused twice. The first to vigorously challenge the certification of his successor in the White House. He now adds another debut: Even as he hopes to return to the White House in 2025, he is the first former president to be indicted.
However, Donald Trump is hardly the first president or former president of the United States to face problems with the law.
The most recent line crossed by Trump once again challenges the aura of the US presidency, nourished by the infallibility of George Washington but humanized time and time again, through scandals born of greed, abuse of power, corruption, naivety , sex and lies about extramarital relationships.
In 1974, Richard Nixon may well have avoided criminal charges of obstruction of justice or bribery related to the Watergate scandal only because President Gerald Ford pardoned him just weeks after Nixon resigned as president.
Bill Clinton had his law license suspended for five years in his native Arkansas after he settled with prosecutors in 2001, late in his second term, over allegations that he lied under oath about his affair with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Some historians wonder about the fate of President Warren Harding had he not died in office in 1923. Officials around him would have been implicated in various crimes, including his Secretary of the Interior, Albert B. Fall, whose corrupt land deals became known as the “Teapot Dome scandal.” “The walls were closing in around him,” presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said of Harding. In the United States, Secretary of the Interior is a position that corresponds to that of director of the Department of Natural Resources in other countries.
Trump’s indictment in New York is reportedly related to how certain business records were tampered with in connection with a $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016, shortly before Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton. for the presidency, to prevent Daniels from going public with a sexual encounter she said she had with him years earlier. Trump denies having sex with her.
Trump is also under investigation for allegedly trying to change the results of the 2020 vote in Georgia, a state he narrowly lost to Democrat Joe Biden, and for his role in the violent mob assault on the US Capitol on January 6. 2021, when Trump supporters tried to prevent Congress from certifying Biden as president. Trump has denied doing anything improper, calling the New York investigation “a witch hunt”.
While in office, Trump adopted a Justice Department judicial opinion that a president could not be indicted. However, once a president leaves office, that protection is gone.
Most of the former US presidents of the past half-century have led relatively quiet public lives: creating foundations, delivering lucrative speeches, or, in the case of Jimmy Carter, doing lavish charity work. The fall from grace marked Nixon for years, though eventually he reemerged to speak on global issues and advise aspiring politicians and potential presidents, including Trump.
The immediate cause of Nixon’s resignation was the discovery of the “smoking gun”: tape recordings from the Oval Office, initiated by Nixon himself, which revealed that he had ordered a cover-up of the 1972 illegal raid of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington. By 1974, the scandal had spread well beyond the initial crime. Many of Nixon’s top aides had resigned and were ultimately jailed. Nixon himself was a possible target of the special counsel appointed for the Watergate case.
“There were partisans in Congress and on the special counsel team who would have liked to see Nixon indicted after he resigned, or who at least believed the clemency was premature.”, states John A. Farrell, author of “Richard Nixon: The Life”, an award-winning biography published in 2017. “But the special counsel, Leon Jaworski, had consistently chosen to deal with Nixon through the constitutional, impeachment process.”.
Farrell points out that Ford pardoned Nixon so quickly after he resigned that Jaworski’s office did not have time to fully consider the charges against Nixon. Ford himself later said that an “indictment, a trial, a conviction and whatever else happened” would have distracted the country from more immediate problems.
“This is what can be said: Nixon himself was very concerned about the possibility (of being prosecuted), to the point that harming his health”Farrell said, referring to Nixon’s problems with his phlebitis: the inflammation of the veins in his leg.
“He was musing aloud about how some of the great political writing in history had been crafted in jail cells. His family, very concerned, contacted the White House, alerting Ford collaborators to the deterioration of the former president’s condition.”.
The Nixon and Harding administrations were among several defined by the scandal, without the president being formally charged.
Ulysses Grant, the Union general and Civil War hero, was otherwise naive about those around him. Numerous members of his presidential cabinet were involved in financial crimes, from extortion to market manipulation. Grant himself was caught for a more trivial offense. During his first term, in 1872, he was arrested twice for going too fast in his carriage.
“The second time Grant had to pay a $20 fine, but he never spent a night in jail.”, recounts historian Ron Chernow, whose biography of Grant was published in 2017.
A tragedy could have saved a future president.
By the fall of 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson had fallen out of favor in the John F. Kennedy administration and was in potential jeopardy with the law because his top aide, Bobby Baker, was under investigation for financial dealings and influence peddling. Johnson, with his own history of questionable finances, denied any close ties to a man he once claimed to love like a son.
On the morning of November 22, 1963, Life magazine was organizing an investigation, and the congressional hearings had just begun. Within hours, however, Kennedy had been assassinated, Johnson had been sworn in as his successor, and interest in Baker’s affairs essentially ceased.
Source: Gestion
Ricardo is a renowned author and journalist, known for his exceptional writing on top-news stories. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he is known for his ability to deliver breaking news and insightful analysis on the most pressing issues of the day.
