Impeachment
...erson Clinton. With Nixon resigning before the trial against him could begin and Clinton being impeached in the House, but acquitted in the Senate. The scandals surrounding the Impeachment proceedings with both Nixon and Clinton bear striking similarities. Nixon was faced with the Watergate scandal, while Clinton was faced with a myriad of others, including; Whitewater, file-gate, travel-gate, and pardon-gate. Watergate was the biggest political scandal in US history. The burglary, wiretapping, violation of campaign financing laws and the use of government agencies to harm political opponents were all designed to help Nixon win re-election in 1972. The scandal got its name from the Watergate complex of apartments and office buildings in Washington D.C. Police arrested five men breaking into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters. The press discovered the White House aids had helped finance the sabotage and spying operations against Democratic candidates. Nixon appointed a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, to head up the Senate Selects Committee. The committee learned that Nixon had secretly made tape recordings of conversations in the White House offices. Nixon refused to turn over the tapes. He claimed he had a constitutional right to keep them confidential. The Committee sued Nixon to obtain the tapes. Nixon offered to provide summaries of the tapes, but Cox rejected the offer. Nixon ordered the Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General to fire Cox. Both refused and resigned. When the House of Representative began impeachment proceedings, Nixon agreed to supply the tapes. It was discovered that three key conversations were missing. Nixon again claimed he had a constitutional right to protect the confidential documents. The case was taken to the Supreme Court, which ruled that a President cannot withhold evidence in a criminal case. The transcripts revealed that the Nixon had ordered the cover up. He resigned before impeachment proceedings could begin. In the impeachment case against Bill Clinton, Kenneth Starr was appointed to investigate a failed Arkansas real estate deal involving the Clintons during their early political careers. The scope of the Whitewater investigation expanded to include other scandals with accusations of fraud, obstruction of justice and abuse of power. The Whitewater Development Corporation refers to an Arkansas real estate deal in which then Attorney General, Bill Clinton and his wife entered a partnership with James and Susan McDougal to develop 220 acres of riverfront land. The partnership failed and the savings and loan which the McDougals owned and for which Hillary Clinton did legal work went under at tax payer’s expense. The Clinton’s received a large share of the development without putting up any money. When Whitewater went sour, additional capital was needed. Allegedly, the cash was obtained illegally from the United States government and never paid back. The McDougals were found guilty of fraud and the Clintons were accused of covering up the details of the Whitewater scandal in Washington. In the file-gate scandal, the Clintons and the FBI were defendants in a class action lawsuit. They were accused of requesting confidential FBI information on former Bush and Reagan Administration staffers and others to gain sensitive information on perceived political opponents and material witnesses to use in smear campaigns. The premise of the file-gate lawsuit is invasion of privacy claims and the Privacy Act. This federal law was enacted in 1974 as a result of misuses of information in government files and abuses of power during the Nixon administration. The travel-gate scandal pertained to an incident in which Hilary Clinton fired the White House travel staff, and then replaced them with a private firm that she sponsored. When an investigation was begun to look into this it was found that Clinton gave factually false testimony about the firings, but did not do so with criminal intent. So there was not enough evidence or cause to indict her. The final main scandal of the Clinton administration was pardon-gate. Pardon-gate brought into light some dubious choices that Clinton made in granting presidential pardons, and he was accused of accepting goods, money, and services in exchange for pardons. Most questionable out of all of his commutations, pardons, and clemency grants was the full pardon of Marc Rich. Marc Rich was a wealthy oil tycoon a regular at OPEC conferences. In 1983, facing charges of racketeering, illegal trading and tax evasion Rich fled the country to Switzerland. It was the disclosure that Rich’s ex-wife, a wealthy New York socialite, made large financial contributions to the Democratic Party that caused many Republicans to question the merit of Clinton’s pardon of Rich. The scandals of Nixon and the Clintons were similar in that they involved cover-ups, stonewalling, lying to the American people, witness tampering, stalling investigations, obstruction of justice, claims of executive privilege, attacks on the special prosecutor, perjury, and abuse of power. The Clinton case involved personal perjury by the president himself. Both cases effectively pitted the chief executive against the judiciary branch of government. The only real difference between the two sets...