- Watergate – In June 1972, two months prior to President Richard Nixon’s re-election by the Republican party, five men were arrested for breaking into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington. The burglars were connected to Nixon’s campaign staff, which set a long-running investigation by the media, the FBI, and Congress into Nixon’s presidency. As they discovered, Nixon and his aides conspired to cover up their connection with this incident. Further digging into this case discovered that Nixon used this tactic of political spying and sabotaging for all of his political opponents.
- Teapot Dome – In 1922, President Warren Harding’s interior secretary, Albert Fall, pulled some strings to gain control of oil reserves on federal land in Wyoming. Even more, he awarded no-bid contracts to private oil companies and gave them lucrative rights to extract oil and gas from the land. A small Wyoming oil operator complained to his senator that there wasn’t any bidding organized, and the Senate began its investigations. They discovered that Fall took bribes, no-interest loans, and other gifts in exchange for the drilling rights to the Teapot Dome oil fields. He was found guilty and became the first former Cabinet member to go to prison.
- The whiskey ring – In 1875, the whiskey business was extremely tough for whiskey makers, as they were dealing with federal taxes on distilled spirits. Even so, the issue exploded during President Ulysses Grant’s second term, when his Treasury secretary, Benjamin Bristow, exposed an organized effort of whiskey distillers to keep the tax revenue to themselves. Even more, they bribed officials at the IRS and Treasury into letting the matter slip away each time it happened. The investigation led to 238 indictments and 110 convictions, where Grant’s personal secretary, Orville Babcock, was involved.
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