NEW YORK — Donald Trump has made history so many times. The first president with no government or military experience. The first to be charged twice. The first to vigorously challenge the certification of his successor in the White House. Now add another start: Although he hopes to return to the White House in 2025, he is the first former president to be impeached.
However, Donald Trump is not the first president or former president of the United States to run into trouble with the law.
The last line crossed by Trump once again calls into question the aura of the American 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 extramarital lies. relationships.
In 1974, Richard Nixon may 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 lawyer’s license suspended for five years in his native Arkansas after settling with prosecutors in 2001, at the end of his second term, following allegations that he lied under oath about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Some historians question the fate of President Warren Harding had he not died in office in 1923. Officials around him were allegedly 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, the 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 believed to relate to how certain business documents were forged as part of a $130,000 payment to porn actress Stormy Daniels in 2016, shortly before Trump beat Democrat Hillary Clinton for the presidency, to prevent Daniels from going public with sex. encounter she said she had with him years earlier. Trump denies having sex with her.
Trump is also under investigation for allegedly trying to alter the results of the 2020 vote in Georgia, a state he narrowly lost to Democrat Joe Biden, and for his role in the violent assault on the crowd against the US Capitol on January 6, 2020. 2021, when Trump supporters tried to block Congress from certifying Biden as president. Trump denied doing anything improper and called the New York investigation a “witch hunt.”
While in office, Trump adopted a judicial opinion from the Justice Department that a president could not be charged. However, once a president leaves office, this protection disappears.
Most former US presidents of the past half-century have led relatively quiet public lives: founding foundations, lucrative speeches or, in the case of Jimmy Carter, lavish charity work. The fall from grace scarred Nixon for years, though he eventually reemerged to speak on global issues and advise aspiring politicians and would-be presidents, including Trump.
The immediate cause of Nixon’s resignation was the discovery of the “smoking gun”: Oval Office tape recordings, initiated by Nixon himself, which revealed that he had ordered a cover-up of the illegal 1972 raid on headquarters of the National Committee. at the Watergate complex in Washington. By 1974, the scandal had spread far beyond the original crime. Many of Nixon’s top aides had resigned and were eventually imprisoned. Nixon himself was a possible target of the special counsel appointed for the Watergate case.
“There were supporters in Congress and on the special counsel team who would have liked to see Nixon indicted after his resignation, or who at least believed clemency was premature,” says John A. Farrell, author of “Richard Nixon: The Life,” an award-winning biography published in 2017. “But special counsel Leon Jaworski had always chosen to deal with Nixon through the constitutional impeachment process.”
Former President Donald Trump has been charged with multiple counts in a case involving alleged payments of
Farrell points out that Ford pardoned Nixon so quickly after his resignation that Jaworski’s office did not have time to fully review the charges against Nixon. Ford himself later said that an “indictment, trial, conviction and all that happened” would have diverted the country from more immediate problems.
“Here’s what you can say: Nixon himself was very concerned about the possibility (of being sued) to the point that it was detrimental to his health,” Farrell said, referring to Nixon’s issues with his phlebitis – inflammation of the leg veins.
“He was thinking aloud about how some of the great political writings in history were written in prison cells. His family, very worried, contacted the White House, alerting Ford collaborators to the deteriorating condition of the former president.
The Nixon and Harding administrations were among several defined by scandal, without the president being formally indicted.
Ulysses Grant, the Union general and Civil War hero, was otherwise naive about those around him. Many members of his presidential cabinet have been implicated in financial crimes, ranging from extortion to market manipulation. Grant himself was arrested for a more insignificant offense. During his first term in 1872, he was arrested twice for being too fast in his car.
“The second time Grant had to pay a $20 fine, but he never spent a night in jail,” says 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 potentially threatened by law because his top aide, Bobby Baker, was under investigation for dealings. financial and influence peddling. Johnson, with his own history of dodgy finances, has denied any close connection to a man he once claimed to love as a son.
On the morning of November 22, 1963, Life magazine was organizing an investigation and the congressional hearings had just begun. However, within hours Kennedy had been assassinated, Johnson had been sworn in as his successor, and interest in Baker’s business had essentially ceased.