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‘Bad Behavior By People In High Office’: Rachel Maddow On The Lessons Of Spiro Agnew

There are countless presidential scandals in U.S. history, but very few of them have resulted in resignation or impeachment — which is precisely why MSNBC host Rachel Maddow was drawn to the story of Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s first vice president, who resigned in 1973.

Maddow notes there are many misconceptions concerning the former vice president — including the notion that his “big sin” centered on taxes.

“When I tried to sort of thumbnail in my mind what happened in the Agnew resignation, everything I thought about it was wrong,” she says. “I had assumed that it was a Watergate-adjacent scandal, that the FBI was looking into Watergate-related crimes and they stumbled upon something in Spiro Agnew’s taxes. … All of those things were completely wrong.”

Maddow and her former producer Mike Yarvitz created the podcast Bag Man to revisit Agnew’s story. Though his resignation was officially linked to tax evasion, they say that Agnew had engaged in bribery that dated back to the early 1960s, when, as Baltimore County executive, he demanded kickbacks in exchange for local engineering or architecture contracts. He continued the practice even after being elected governor of Maryland in 1967 and then vice president in 1969.

“He … started that scheme in local politics and then he carried it right into the White House,” Yarvitz says. “The men who were sort of streaming into his office at the White House were paying him money for contracts they had gotten in Maryland, and in some cases, he was trying to influence the awarding of federal contracts.”

After the Justice Department began looking into Agnew’s dealings, the vice president tried to pressure the U.S. attorney in charge of the case to halt the investigation — a response Maddow likens to the current administration’s reaction to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and possible ties to the Trump campaign.

“The parallels with what was going on in the Nixon and Agnew administration 45 years ago to the efforts by the Trump administration right now … is uncanny,” Maddow says. “The Agnew story is really helpful to understanding the way the system works when it confronts bad behavior by people in high office. We are capable of dealing with that as a country in a way that makes us proud of the people who are in public office who are dealing with it.”

Photo: AP Then-President Richard Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew wave to the crowd at the Republican National Convention in 1972. Agnew would resign a year later