Former President Donald Trump made history in April and June as the first former president to be indicted at both the state and federal levels. However, he is not the first executive to come face to face with investigations.
Trump is now indicted in Manhattan on charges related to hush money payments during the 2016 campaign and federally indicted for allegedly violating the Espionage Act when he retained hundreds of classified documents. He has decried the historic indictments as a "witch hunt" and claimed that no other president besides him had ever faced such injustice.
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Several past presidents have come close — or might have come close — to facing off with the U.S. judicial system before Trump did. Below are some past presidents that have had their own run-ins with misconduct and federal investigations.
Richard Nixon
Richard Nixon served from 1969 until 1974 as the 37th president. After Trump, he is the president most known for his biggest scandal: Watergate.
Watergate involved several criminal elements, including burglaries, illegal wiretaps, and other crimes relating to Nixon's 1972 reelection campaign.
Nixon faced a Department of Justice investigation but did not face an indictment, nor was he ever federally charged. However, in 2018, the National Archives released a set of documents called the "Watergate Road Map" that included a would-be indictment against Nixon.
It showed a series of charges drawn up against Nixon, including bribery, conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and obstruction of a criminal investigation.
As a result of Watergate, Nixon faced impeachment but instead chose to resign. Forty government officials were indicted or jailed. Seven of Nixon's aides were charged with conspiracy, and six were charged with obstruction of justice, but none were charged with bribery.
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton served from 1993 to 2001 as the 42nd president. His scandal, while not criminal in nature, still led to accusations of obstructing justice.
In its second term, Clinton's presidency was overshadowed by an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern working in 1998. Special counsel Ken Starr was appointed by a federal appeals court to look into Clinton's affair with Lewinsky in the fall of 1998.
Ultimately, Clinton was accused of giving false testimony to a grand jury (perjury) and obstruction of justice. The House approved two articles of impeachment, one for each charge, based upon his false representations during the investigation. Clinton was found not guilty in the Senate.
Clinton drew special counsel attention at the beginning of his presidency after the DOJ opened an investigation into Whitewater, a real estate deal tied to a savings-and-loan failure in Arkansas. Clinton served as Arkansas's governor from 1979 to 1981 and again from 1982 to 1992 before becoming president.
Starr was assigned to the Whitewater investigation. When Lewinsky was secretly recorded by the FBI discussing her affair with Clinton, Starr's investigation was expanded to look into whether the former president had lied under oath — something Clinton eventually admitted to. He was never indicted or charged with any crime.
Vietnam War presidents
Presidents Nixon, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson, and John F. Kennedy have all, to some degree, been under scrutiny for their role in the U.S. government's actions during the Vietnam War.
Their alleged war crimes surfaced after Daniel Ellsberg released top secret documents to the press, including the New York Times and Washington Post, now known as the Pentagon Papers in 1972. The papers were part of a Department of Defense study on U.S. involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967.
The papers, among several details, showed that the presidents misled the public on the details and outcomes of conflicts dating back to World War II and the Cold War. The public mainly focused on the revelation that the U.S. government knew the war was unwinnable but did not stop escalating its involvement by sending more troops or increasing the budget.
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The presidents were never held responsible overseas, nor were they federally indicted or prosecuted in the U.S.
However, the papers affected Nixon the most, as he was facing reelection in 1972, and the information revealed to the public led directly to the Watergate scandal.