BY OLIVIA B. WAXMAN
POLITICS
DONALD TRUMP COULD MAKE HISTORY ONCE again—this time as the first former U.S. President ever to be criminally indicted. If it happens, it’s apt to be by the Manhattan grand jury probing his alleged hush-money payment to former porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. Daniels, real name Stephanie Clifford, says she and Trump had an affair; Trump denies this.
“Like all things with Trump, it’s unprecedented,” says Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Ulysses S. Grant was the first President to be arrested, for speeding on a horse and buggy in 1872. But the Trump case would go down as one of the biggest political scandals in American history—even if the charges relate to the seemingly mundane offense of bookkeeping fraud. Criminal history, as it pertains to U.S. Presidents, is pretty brief.
The Watergate scandal is the closest parallel. Richard Nixon stepped down in 1974 after tapes revealed (among other crimes) his role in the cover-up of the 1972 break-in at a Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate complex. Several Nixon advisers, from the White House lawyer to the Attorney General, served prison time. While the Department of Justice initially argued that a President couldn’t be indicted on a criminal charge, Nixon was not assured that protection postpresidency, so his successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him. But a September 1974 Gallup poll reported 53% of Americans thought the pardon was the wrong thing to do, and it’s one of the reasons Ford was voted out of office in the next election.
Arrests of major federal officials have a longer history. Albert Fall, Secretary of the Interior under President Warren G. Harding, was convicted of bribery in 1929 for accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in Liberty bonds after allowing a private company to lease oil reserves in Wyoming known as Teapot Dome. Back then, TIME called Fall “the first felon in a President’s cabinet in U.S. history.” As biographer Robert Dallek explained the significance of the scandal, “People in the government were selling
