Following the indictment of Donald Trump on June 9, for the unauthorized hoarding and occasional disclosure of classified documents and national defense information, Fintan O’Toole wrote an analysis of the Justice Department’s case and the implications of Trump’s alleged crimes: “Trump went to great lengths to retain for himself, as a private citizen, the power to reveal to any foreign power not just US military secrets but the workings of US intelligence-gathering in those countries.” This came after the March 31 indictment of Trump by a Manhattan grand jury, for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels and lying about it, which O’Toole wrote about in the Review’s May 11 issue: “History is being made, but it is, like Trump himself, history unfolding the second, third, and fourth time as farce, so that its primary tragedy is buried under layers of absurdity.”

Below, alongside O’Toole’s essays, we have collected five pieces from our archives about the long history of presidential legal scandals.

Fintan O’Toole
The Ultimate Deal

Trump’s hoarding of official secrets is both breathtakingly careless and utterly calculated.

Fintan O’Toole
Bump and Grind

That our former president is likely to be indicted for paying hush money to a porn star and lying about it shows the Trumpification of our politics: the relationship between reality and story has gone buck wild.

Joan Didion
Clinton Agonistes

“Ten weeks after America first heard the name Monica Lewinsky and still in the absence of any allegation bearing on the President’s performance of his duties, the reasons the President needed to go were that he had been ‘weakened,’ that he would be ‘unable to function.’”

Theodore H. Draper
Reagan’s Junta

“The implications of government by secret presidential junta strike at the very roots of the American system of government. One way to think about them is to note how the Iran-contra affair has been defended or rationalized by those politically or ideologically closest to the President.”

I. F. Stone
A Special Supplement: Impeachment

“There are two reasons for seriously considering the impeachment of Richard Nixon. One is that this may prove the only kind of legal proceeding in which the President’s complicity in the unfolding Watergate and related scandals may be fully and fairly determined. The other is that only so grave a step may deter a future President from the abuses charged against the Nixon White House.”

Russell Baker
Back to Normalcy!

“Unexciting though they now may seem, the scandals blackened Harding’s reputation so thoroughly that many historians still rank him as America’s worst president.”

David S. Reynolds
He Was No Moses

“Although Johnson remained in office, he became a shadow president. His exoneration led Thaddeus Stevens to grumble, ‘The country is going to the devil.’ Stevens had reason for pessimism. The white supremacy exhibited by Johnson and others of his era persisted; it reached a nadir during Jim Crow and, of course, remains a fraught political issue today.”