Donald J. Trump is in court for a number of reasons currently, although he still remains favorite for the Republican nomination for the presidency. With that in mind, here Larry Deblinger looks at some of the criminal (or possibly criminal) dealings of some former Republican presidents.
Harding’s Gang? President Warren G. Harding’s first cabinet in 1921.
The Republican party of the United States is in flux as it seeks to forge its future with or without the leadership of former president Donald J. Trump. While Trump holds a commanding lead in the polls in the race for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, he is also facing trial on four criminal indictments encompassing 91 separate charges. Republican politicians and rank-and file-voters must decide whether they will support Trump should he be both their party’s nominee and a convicted felon. Depending on the trial outcomes, it may be a stark choice of Trump or the law.
But the stakes of the present moment for the future of the Republican party, and, potentially, of American democracy, can only be fully appreciated in light of the GOP’s past. The history of the presidencies of the Republican party, which often brands itself “the party of law and order,” includes a long criminal record, spanning almost the entire existence of the party, of which the Trump administration, despite some unprecedented aspects of its law-breaking, is only the latest chapter. What Republicans decide today will help determine whether that heritage of lawlessness at the highest levels of national government, where a political party is expected to assemble its best and brightest and promote its core tenets, will continue to stain the character of the GOP.
Grant’s Invasion
The criminal record of Republican presidencies substantially begins a mere 15 years after the 1854 birth of the GOP, with the administration of Ulysses S. Grant (1869-1877). At this time, corruption in government was common since the so-called “spoils system,” as in “to the victor go the spoils,” held sway in American politics, determining government jobs, favors and funding through political patronage.1 But federal executive branch corruption erupted to unprecedented and shocking levels under Grant. The scandals, too numerous to detail in total, ran from bribery, fraud, and extortion to embezzlement and financial market manipulation and permeated the departments of the Treasury, Interior, Justice, War (now called Defense), the Navy, and the Postal Service, reaching to top cabinet officers and the vice-president.2
The malfeasance by the end of Grant’s first term was such that it helped trigger a breakaway faction of his party who called themselves the Liberal Republicans and opposed Grant’s 1872 re-election. Among other points of opposition to Grant, the Liberals charged that “The Civil Service of the Government has become a mere instrument of partisan tyranny and personal ambition, and an object of selfish greed. It is a scandal and reproach upon free institutions, and breeds a demoralization dangerous to the perpetuity of republican government.”3
The Whiskey Ring
The most extensive of the Grant administration scandals was the Whiskey Ring. Grant had sent an old friend whom he had appointed to the Treasury, General John McDonald, to head up federal tax revenue collection in Missouri, a hotbed of support for the Liberal Republicans. Once there, McDonald observed that whiskey distillers had been bribing federal revenue agents for years to allow them to underpay what they owed in taxes. Rather than curtail the illegality, McDonald and other Republican operatives got in on the action, forming the Whiskey Ring in conjunction with distillers, ostensibly to divert the unpaid tax money to a slush fund for Grant’s re-election in 1872 and other Republican campaigns.4 Storekeepers, treasury clerks, revenue agents and others in the whiskey chain were forced to cooperate, sometimes through impressment and blackmail.4 After the 1872 elections, the Whiskey Ring outgrew its original, perhaps specious political purposes to become a nationwide crime syndicate operated entirely for the enrichment of the conspirators. After it was uncovered and investigated by Grant’s Justice Department starting in 1875, 110 conspirators, including MacDonald, were convicted of crimes (e.g., defrauding the US Treasury) and over $3 million in stolen revenues were recovered.5
Despite the scandals of his administration and opposition of the Liberals, Grant, the former top general of the Union army and Civil war hero, won re-election handily. Grant appeared to be unaware of the various corrupt activities in his administration, and urged prosecution of the malefactors when informed of them.6 But he was drawn into the Whiskey Ring scandal when his private secretary, Orville Babcock, was indicted and tried in criminal court for involvement in the scheme. Grant testified on behalf of Babcock, denying his guilt and defending his character, in a deposition taken at the White House. Owing largely to Grant’s testimony, Babcock was eventually acquitted, but was later accused of complicity in another corrupt scheme.4,5 For years afterwards, fairly or not, the term “Grantism” was synonymous with government corruption.7
Harding’s Gang
Following Grant, the Progressive era of the late nineteenth and early 20th century in the US promoted “good government” policies which helped to curb government corruption. Progressive Republicans such as Theodore Roosevelt played prominent roles in this movement.8 But Americans came to tire of Progressivism under the strident leadership and activism of the Democratic president Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921), and in 1920, they voted a conservative Republican, Warren G. Harding, into the White House. Harding had run on the campaign theme of a “return to normalcy.”9 If by normalcy Harding meant a return to Republican officials criminally abusing the powers of the Federal government, he delivered in spades.
A handsome, statuesque, and genial man with a turbo-charged sex-drive, Harding had risen through the shady world of Ohio politics and brought his cronies from that milieu to the executive branch. Known as the Ohio gang, Harding’s associates generated a font of corruption.
The disclosures began in early 1923 at the Veteran’s Bureau (now the Department of Veterans’ Affairs), leading to the resignation of the Director, Charles R. Forbes and the suicide of the General Counsel, Charles T. Cramer. Forbes was convicted in 1924 of conspiracy to defraud the government, involving the theft of more than $200 million in bureau funds, and sentenced to two years in prison.10,11
The odor of corruption led next to the office of the Alien Property Custodian, which adjudicated claims for properties confiscated from Germans during World War I. Congressional investigators the bureau to be a sump of bribery and graft. The Custodian, Thomas W. Miller, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government and imprisoned.12 Harding’s Attorney General, Harry Daugherty, a key member of the Ohio gang, was brought to trial on charges of involvement in the Alien Bureau schemes and was acquitted, although it was brought out that he had burned bank ledger sheets of his and other accounts to destroy evidence.13 Daugherty was also accused of running a bribery/protection racket for alcohol dealers trying to evade the Prohibition law then in effect but was never prosecuted.14 However, Daugherty’s secretary and close friend, Jess Smith, committed suicide under mysterious circumstances.15
Oil Money Bribes
The infamous Teapot Dome scandal, also occurring under the Harding administration, was named for a federal government reserve of oil-bearing land at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, intended for use by the US Navy and managed by the Interior Department. After a series of investigations and criminal trials revealing an intricate and scandalous web of corporate-government corruption, Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall was convicted and imprisoned for receiving bribes in return for leasing Teapot Dome and other federal oil reserves to private companies.16
The full extent of Harding’s knowledge of the corruption in his administration remains unknown, largely because he died suddenly while in office in 1923. In his classic 1931 history of the 1920s, “Only Yesterday,” Frederick Lewis Allen, author and Editor of Harper’s magazine, opined that “the Harding administration was responsible in its short two years and five months for more concentrated robbery and rascality than any other in the whole history of the Federal government.”17
Nixon’s Criminal Cohort
It is sometimes forgotten that Richard M. Nixon set the tone for his administration (1969-74) well before the Watergate scandal with his choice for vice-president, Spiro T. Agnew, Governor of Maryland. Little-known outside of Maryland, Agnew was a tough, plain-spoken politician whom the Nixonites thought would be perfect for their campaign. It turned out that Agnew was a creature straight from the Grant-Harding school of politics as criminal enterprise. Agnew had not only run a bribery racket as County Executive and then Governor of Maryland, extorting public works contractors for kickbacks of government-appropriated funds, he continued receiving the payments—in envelopes stuffed with cash—as Vice-President of the US.18 Faced with criminal charges of extortion, bribery, graft, conflict of interest, and tax evasion, Agnew pleaded to the least embarrassing charge, tax evasion, in return for resigning his office and a $10,000 fine.19
The Watergate Scandal
Then there was Watergate. The infamous burglary of Democratic National Committee headquarters and cover-up, the latter personally engineered by Nixon and his White House staff, encompassed a vast scale of illegal activities and abuses of power. As in the Harding administration, the nation’s top legal official, Attorney General John Mitchell, was a key facilitator of illegality under Nixon. A century after Republican operatives under Grant used the Whiskey Ring to raise re-election campaign funds through intimidation and blackmail, Nixon re-election campaign officials also used an illegally derived slush fund, including campaign contributions from corporations, which were outlawed at the time, to finance the Watergate break in and other crimes and “dirty tricks,” laundering the money through banks in Mexico.20,21
Overall, 69 Nixon administration officials were indicted for crimes related to Watergate or other illegal activities and 48 were convicted, including Attorney General Mitchell.22 A grand jury was set to charge Nixon with bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and obstruction of a criminal investigation but prosecution was deterred by questions over whether a sitting president could be indicted.23 In any event, like his vice-president before him, Nixon resigned in disgrace.
Reagan Restores a Republican Tradition
After the brief period of atonement known as the Ford administration (1974-77), which was most notable for President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of Nixon, the Republicans were back at it with the presidency of Ronald W. Reagan (1981-89). Reagan bore curious echoes of Harding as a genial, handsome, somewhat inattentive man promising to restore a nostalgic era of simpler times in America. And like Harding, Reagan presided over a viral outbreak of corruption in the federal government of a magnitude unseen since the days of the Ohio gang.24 Abuses of office occurred at no less than 20 different federal departments and agencies, according to Pulitzer prize-winning Washington Post journalist and author Haynes Johnson.25
“By the end of his (Reagan’s) term 138 administration officials had been convicted, had been indicted, or had been the subject of official investigations for official misconduct and/or criminal violations. In terms of numbers of officials involved, the record of his administration was the worst ever,” wrote Johnson, in his 1991 history of the Reagan administration, “Sleepwalking Through History.”26
Cascading Corruption
The Iran-Contra affair is the most famous of the Reagan-era scandals, but that episode could at least be portrayed as a principled, if illegal, attempt to fight the spread of socialism in Central America. Less noted is that the Reagan administration was rife with raw, greed-driven corruption, which by one estimate amounted to a total theft of $130billion in public funds.27 A prime example was the Wedtech case, involving a Defense Department contractor, which Johnson described as “the kind of political corruption that extended back to the Washington (DC) of Grant and Harding: influence peddling, government contracts, cash, bribes, kickbacks, fraud and conspiracy.”28 The subsequent “Operation Ill Wind” probe by the FBI, investigating further corruption in Defense Department procurement, resulted in 50 convictions, including those of high-ranking military officers and administration officials.29
And on it went, across the federal government in a veritable feeding frenzy from the department of Housing and Urban Development, where an estimated $8 billion in public funds were stolen,30 to the Environmental Protection Agency where the director resigned rather than cooperate with a Congressional investigation of political manipulation of department funds.31 As in the Harding and Nixon administrations, the nation’s top law enforcement officer came under scrutiny for alleged lawbreaking. Edwin Meese III, Reagan’s Attorney General starting in 1984, was the object of a 14-month special prosecutor and federal grand jury investigation of alleged criminal financial improprieties. Although Meese was acquitted, he became an object of ridicule at the Department of Justice where morale plummeted.32
Government-Sponsored Organized Crime
The Iran-Contra scandal involved a secret scheme concocted by high-ranking officials at the CIA and the National Security Agency to sell arms to Iran and use the proceeds to fund the Contras of Nicaragua, who were fighting the socialist regime of their country. The arms sales to Iran violated US policy of not negotiating with terrorists, and the Arms Export Control Act of 1976. The support for the Contras violated the 1984 Boland Amendment, which specifically prohibited all military aid to the Contras or other groups in Nicaragua.33 Moreover, the murky scheme involved an unholy host of money changers, drug dealers, arms dealers, and terrorists, amounting to what one writer has described as “American-sponsored organized crime.”34
The Independent Prosecutor on the case, Lawrence E. Walsh, ultimately indicted 14 individuals with criminal charges of whom 11 were convicted, including National Security Adviser John M. Poindexter, Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North, National Security Adviser Robert C. McFarlane, and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams.35 Four counts of perjury and false statements were pending against Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger when he was pardoned in 1992 by President George H. W. Bush, who also pardoned Abrams and MacFarlane, among others. Walsh, a lifelong Republican, reportedly called Bush’s pardon of Weinberger, “one of the great cover-ups of American history at the highest levels of the executive branch.”36
Reagan pleaded ignorance of the Iran Contra scheme, while accepting responsibility for it. Although Reagan made multiple false statements regarding the activities in a televised speech to the nation,37 there was no evidence he knew they were false, and Walsh declined to indict him.38
And then there was Trump, who is now charged under one of his four indictments (from the state of Georgia) of running a “criminal enterprise” along with 17 co-defendants.
A Partisan Pattern?
Of the 19 total Republican presidencies, four, not including that of Trump, have each compiled a criminal record unparalleled by any other administration of any other party in US history. The outbreaks have been sporadic but persistent to this day. Yet, the question could be raised as to whether this record truly reveals a penchant for lawlessness specific to the GOP or simply a tendency endemic to all political parties. As the famous saying goes, “power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Over their history, the Democrats have surely demonstrated no blanket immunity to corruption. During the 1860s and 1870s, the era of the spoilsmen, the Tweed Ring of New York City, run by the notorious “Boss” Tweed of the Democratic party, was a nexus of corrupt rackets that dominated city politics and set a standard for “boss”-run “party machines” nationwide. The Democratic-run states of New York, Illinois, and New Jersey have long been known for systemic corruption. Former New York State Democratic Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver died a convict in 2022 after being found guilty of corruption in 2015, and Democratic Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey is currently facing bribery charges. Numerous other Democratic federal legislators have also been convicted of crimes in office.39 And the vast majority of Republican federal, executive branch office holders have been law abiding. The many Republicans who declared themselves ready to convict Nixon in his impeachment trial and forced his resignation demonstrated a courageous commitment to the law, as did those who testified for the January 6th Committee, and the two who served as committee members.
The Parties Compared
There is no comparison, however, between the criminal records of Democrats and Republicans in the presidency, the pinnacle of the US government, a fact supported by several media outlets using online data. Politifact, a nonpartisan website, found that there were 142 indictments against members of the past three Republican administrations (including Trump’s) versus just two under the past three Democratic presidents.40 The Huffington Post, a left-leaning news site, reported 91 criminal convictions connected to Republican presidencies versus only one under a Democrat since 1970.41 And the Daily Kos, another left-wing media site, tallied 120 indictments, 82 convictions, and 34 imprisonments for Republicans from the Nixon through the Obama administrations versus 4, 2, and 2, respectively, for the Democrats.42
What is next for the Republicans? If Trump is convicted, Republicans may or may not choose to move beyond him. The greater question for their party, and for US democracy, is whether the Republicans will leave behind or continue their heritage of criminal abuse of power at the highest levels of the US government, of which the Trump administration is but the latest chapter.
What do you think of the author’s argument? Let us know below.
References
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