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President Donald Trump, with the red hat, and former President Bill Clinton, in the green shirt, at a charity golf event in 2008. Both Trump and Clinton were the targets of intense scrutiny by special prosecutors, but neither was charged with any major crimes.
The Mueller probe of an alleged Trump-Russia conspiracy to fix the 2016 presidential election ended like so many special investigations in the post-Watergate era: With a whimper, not a bang.
Robert Mueller’s team of federal investigators found no evidence of an underlying crime the triggered the two-year probe in the first place. Yet they convicted a handful of people on so-called process charges such as perjury and obstruction or charges of financial fraud unrelated to the main thread of the investigation.
That’s been the norm — not the exception — since the Watergate scandal spurred Congress in 1978 to enact a new law that gave birth to the Independent Counsel, an office with broad powers whose influence turned out to be far more consequential than its authors foresaw.
The earliest and most prominent example was the seven-year Iran-Contra investigation into whether the Reagan administration broke U.S. laws in the mid-1980s by skirting an arms embargo to Iran and using part of the proceeds against the wishes of Congress to fund rebels battling the left-wing Sandinista government in El Salvador.
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A handful of officials were eventually charged with perjury, obstruction of justice, making false statements or destroying documents. None were found guilty of broader violations such as illicit arms sales Iran or illegal money transfers to Salvadoran rebels.
President George H.W. Bush later pardoned five individuals and a federal court overturned the conviction of another top Reagan administration official.
Democrats got their turn under the prosecutorial microscope during the Clinton presidency.
Most famously, President Bill Clinton himself was investigated by a special counsel over the so-called Whitewater real estate deal in Arkansas years before he became president.
The four-year investigation never charged the Clintons with any crimes related to Whitewater, but more than a dozen people were convicted of crimes ranging from fraud, tax evasion or conspiracy, some of them unrelated to Whitewater.
Like Bush, Clinton pardoned some of the principal players in the probe.
What Whitewater became most infamous for, of course, was uncovering the president’s sexual dalliance with young White House intern Monica Lewinsky in the mid-1990s.
Special Counsel Kenneth Star concluded that Clinton’s denial was false and perjurious, leading to a failed attempt by the Republican-controlled Congress to impeach him in 1998.
Around the same time, the Clinton administration’s agriculture secretary, Mike Espy, was charged by a special counsel with accepting $35,000 worth of improper gifts. Espy was acquitted in 1997 of all charges.
One of the key witnesses claimed he had been pressured into testifying against Espy because of the special counsel’s heavy-handed tactics.
“God knows, if I had $30 million, I could find dirt on you, sir,” the witness told special counsel Donald Smaltz during the trial.
Over the life of the special counsel, that’s one sentiment on which both Democrats and Republicans subject to investigations have agreed. Many of those who’ve been investigated have accused prosecutors of ruining them financially.
In any case, the frustration of both parties with the Watergate-era special counsel law is why they overwhelmingly agreed to let it lapse in 1999. Critics contended the law had been weaponized for the “criminalizing of policy differences,” as Bush put it.
The end of the law, however, has not led to the end of special prosecutors. The Justice Department still has the power to authorize them in unusual situations.
Aside from the probe of President Trump, other notable examples include the FBI’s handling of the Waco siege in 1999 and the Plame Affair during the George W. Bush administration in the mid-2000s.
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The Waco probe stands alone as the only major special investigation that did not lead to additional charges.
The case involving the public outing of former spy Valerie Plame more closely resembled other special probes. Senior White House aide Scooter Libby was found guilty of lying to investigators, but he was not charged with any national-security violations.
The Watergate scandal still stands as the lone modern example in which a special counsel found crimes extending to the very top of the U.S. government. Yet even to this day, it’s never been conclusively proven that Richard Nixon ordered or knew about a gang of Republican operatives breaking into the office of a top Democratic party leader.
Nixon was forced to resign in August 1974 because of his participation in the coverup.
