Some political scandals can mark the end of a career. Think Watergate. They could also mark the beginning of one. Now, back in 1998, CNN anchor and correspondent Jake Tapper was a young writer making his way in Washington when he wrote about his date with Monica Lewinsky. And this was just days after the news broke of her affair with then president Bill Clinton.
I became a staffer, like with the publication of that, of that story, and it was a reflection on scandal. It was about scandal. And the article was called mockingly, I dated Monica Lewinsky. We were making fun of the culture of scandal. And I remember thinking and writing, Washington is giddy. What are we so excited about? Everybody was so thrilled that this was happening in the journalistic and political culture. There was just it was just like.
A quote unquote hot story.
So fun. Except I was watching this young woman’s life be destroyed.
And in many ways, that was a turning point in the narrative of political scandals, because the idea that a scandal could or should send one packing, fall on their sword, or begging the voters forgiveness has long passed. Why? How are we different? Which scandals are punished by the public? Which or not? I’m Audie Cornish. And this is The Assignment. So I wanted to bring on Jake because he did this great CNN Original Series called United States of Scandal. And in the first episode, for example, he’s face to face with former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, and they speak frankly about his going to jail for effectively trying to sell Barack Obama’s Senate seat.
There really isn’t an argument about what you said. It’s on tape.
The question is whether it was illegal and whether it was morally wrong.
Look if you’re saying, “Do we have a fundraising system in America that you can argue is legalized bribery?” I think there’s truth to that. But did I do anything other than that standard that every other person in politics does, from President Biden on down? I did the same as them and nothing worse.
This is one of the conceits of this series, which is talking to the people who were at the center of the scandal. And so I’m very grateful to Rod Blagojevich, Governor Jim McGreevey. Valerie Plame. Rielle Hunter, who was John Edwards girlfriend, as you might remember, and on and on for participating, because they give us their view of it and what Blagojevich asked for, and I think we gave him was, we’re going to give you a fair shot to explain your point of view on this. I’m not going to necessarily agree with it, but you get to explain it. And what was interesting about his point of view was his basic argument is the system is corrupt. And I was just I was just playing in the system. And did I say things more blatantly than maybe other people would have? Sure. But that doesn’t mean that this is, an indictment of me. It’s an indictment of the system now. You have to watch a show to see if I buy it or not. But but he gets to make his argument and.
You can see the mind of such a person at work. You can see how they could also reach a point where they’d say, well, if I do this, this thing, it’s not so bad.
Well, they all think that.
Right. Yet several of them, I feel like said that they knew when they were busted that they were done like so. They knew the minute. Didn’t Blagojevich at one point say something in one of the interviews like, you were like, oh, when did you know it was over? And he was like, oh, well, basically right away, right.
Because the feds come knocking on your door, you know, it’s over. And, you know, but he is still to this day doesn’t think he did anything wrong, and doesn’t think he did anything immoral.
Right. And neither did the President Trump. Right. Did he commute his sentence in 2020?
What happened was that, Rod Blagojevich, his wife… And look, Donald Trump is not there’s a lot of things you could say about him, but one of the things that he’s not is particularly complicated. Like to crack the code on Trump, you go on Fox, you praise Trump. And it helps if you know him already and then you can get pardoned.
So we’ve tackle kind of abuse of power and corruption. Several of the other scandals in the dock are related to sex and sexuality in some way.
Yeah. People trying to live their true selves while living in a world where they have, A, created a completely different persona of who their true self is to the voters. So Eliot Spitzer, as a crusading lawman, when he’s breaking human trafficking laws that he actually signed into law by visiting with prostitutes, and, and then McGreevey obviously married with kids.
A former New Jersey Governor.
Fromer New Jersey Governor married with kids and and living, a closeted life, as a gay man.
And then, of course, there’s also John Edwards, who had built so much of his public persona on having the perfect family, being this kind of small town, not so small town, but small town attorney who fights for the public good, fights for inequality.
This John Grisham character come to life. Exactly. And it turns out that he is. Having…He has girlfriends. At least one that we know of and she says others.
Did you cover that campaign? Because I covered that campaign?
So have you ever had the experience of standing in a huddle where someone has asked him the question, are you having an affair? Because I watched him, I went straight to this group. Tabloid trash. And that was it. Like the question was asked, he made it clear he was moving on and people sort of moved on. Yeah. And this is not to criticize the media in this moment, but to say that. The denial that they use against all of us. Are they in denial themselves?
They think they can survive. It is the denial. They’re not in denial. I don’t think John Edwards didn’t think he was having an affair with Rielle Hunter. I think he thought he could survive it. Because think about the insanity of what he was doing. He was not only. Cheating on his wife, who was battling cancer and ultimately succumbed to cancer. But he was doing all this while he was running for president. It wasn’t like this is a former senator just trying to live a private life. And he’s like having an affair, which arguably is news. But. But it’s hard to justify if he’s living a private life. He was running for president. He was running for president. So it was just wild. And then he got one of his advisers to claim that the baby that Rielle Hunter was having was his a guy named Andrew Young.
And that gets to a point you make in the doc about enablers. Which is something I want to talk about because campaigns are not one person. They might be built around one person. They may rot from the head, as I like to think, but it is a cascading number of decisions that make a campaign. Everybody being so kind of captive to this person, or the idea of this person or the campaign, or just being so in it that they’ll literally do anything to protect this person.
And think about the insanity of it because they were so focused on making sure that John Edwards ended up in the White House. And at that point, by the way, he hadn’t won any contests. Right. I mean, like. Obama won Iowa. Hillary won New Hampshire. I think South Carolina was next, and Obama won that. And like, he wasn’t going to become the presidential nominee. And still by the end, by the way, he was trying to get a promise from Obama to make him attorney general. Like the story was out that he had a girlfriend. I mean
The Gen Z call this delulu.
This was a delulu moment.
The delusion of this person and the people around him. And one of the things that any politician needs, not just politicians, all of us, anyone who has risen to prominence in any degree. What needs is somebody who will tell us when we’re making mistakes. That’s the polite way of telling this story. And he did not have anyone there to do that. He had enablers. I mean, one of the reasons these scandals happened is because. I have a theory. It’s called the Jar Jar Binks theory. And the Jar Jar Binks theory is that people become so successful that they are able to remove from their circle anyone who will tell them when they’re making a major mistake.
But for politicians, the people you selected to focus on here, what they had in common is that they all had a kind of moral standing. Yeah, right. In terms of like Spitzer fighting the good fight legally in terms of Edwards, as we mentioned, talking about inequality and income inequality.
He and Blagojevich were crusaders.
They were coming from high moral perches. And does that affect the fall or does it make you a more vulnerable target?
All these stories are different, and all of them are Shakespearean in their way because Mark Sanford, the governor of South Carolina, who did not resign, he served out his term as governor. He was cheating on his wife with, a woman, a girlfriend who I think was in Argentina.
Yes. And his story is famous because for a short amount of time, he kind of went missing, quote, unquote. His staff didn’t know where he is. No one knew where he was. And then they. And then it came to light that he was with this mistress out of the country.
But he had not done anything. He had done something immoral. One could argue, but he had not done anything criminal. And so that’s different, although it certainly was at odds with his persona, which is here’s this wonderful, sweet local guy. Who is moral and has a wife, Jenny. And four boys. Marshall, Landon, Bolton and Blake. And, this was this was at odds with that persona. I don’t know that anybody would be surprised if Blagojevich were, you know, shady. It comes with the territory in Chicago, and he’s not the first Illinois governor to go to prison in the last 15 years.
He’s not but in the doc, you feature how he, like, had the support of the Black community for some of the initiatives he did. .
He did a lot of good stuff for Chicago. He really did.
He made it. Free to ride the bus, in Chicago, I mean, for for individuals who needed to. I mean, he and he still argues he was a good governor. And you can understand why legislatively, maybe that was true. But at the same time, what he was doing to raise money was corrupt. At least that’s that was the government’s conclusion.
After the break. What drives politicians to break the rules? And how have the consequences for getting caught changed over the years? Back in a moment.
Let’s talk about the formula for what makes a scandal career ending. So in my mind, I think about Watergate. Okay. Because I’m just thinking of, like, when did the highest office in the land, when did someone had to just, like, get on the plane and throw up the peace sign and, like, be done? And it’s like there’s a scandal because something comes to light, there’s an outrage. Your own party turns against you. The walls are closing in and you have to go for one reason or another.
So that was a president court irrefutably committing …ordering the crimes be committed after lying about it. That was, that era. Then you enter the 80s 90s era. Where it used to be joked about in Washington, that the only thing that would end a congressional career is if you get caught with a dead girl or alive boy. That was the ha ha. Isn’t that funny? But that’s not even true because Ted Kennedy was caught with a dead girl. And Barney Frank was caught with a live boy. I mean, like, so that’s not even true. We we started entering a different era. Although Chappaquiddick obviously was in ’69, I think. So it then just became a question of, what did you do? And do you have the support at home? Is there anyone pressing to kick you out of office?
And who is that person and how much power do they have?
Yeah. And also, like, how much of a drag are you on? The party.
Yeah. Anthony Wiener was a huge distraction for Democrats. His horrible, scandal. His worst was yet to come, right when he was interacting with an underage girl. But the scandal of him cheating on his spouse, right?
But to come back to your point, you’re saying that, like anything in Washington, it’s all about relationships and power, etcetera. And if you start affecting other people’s power, right, you become a problem, right?
Right. But there are a lot of people who are able to survive scandals by just moving on.
There isn’t necessarily any one thing that can do you in.
So there’s a couple things that I think have changed since the 90s, which is that number one, cable news, right. Like it’s us where the problem is it’s us like we’re part of this thing. But basically you have more eyeballs on something 24 hours a day, more competition, it’s more intense. This coincides with partisanship because it also developed cable channels developed that are partisan specifically and explicitly to appeal to partisan audience.
Which means, A, somebody like Donald Trump has a built in network supporting him. Fox.
Bingo. So that idea that your power is undermined in the scandal. Well, now it feels a little different because you might have a media kind of megaphone of your supporters, your advocates, who can speak loudly, right? Who can muddy the waters, who can create a new dynamic, who could change the nature of the discussion.
And I’ve talked about this with Watergate figures. Bernstein. Woodward. Others. Would Nixon have survived if he had a Fox News Network, you know, extolling him, defending him? Every one of them thinks it’s that that’s certainly possible.
So the media environment’s changed. There’s also what I’m calling the end of shame, which is that politicians to resign, to have those moments of reflection, to feel, quote unquote, forced. You actually have to feel a kind of internal, at least embarrassment.
Did Bill Clinton feel that? Did David Vitter feel that? Does Donald Trump feel that? I don’t know.
So that’s what I’m saying. Like that. Yeah. From the 90s on, you get the sense that it’s like, hey, one of the tools for politicians is their own moral compass. Shame or not, embarrassment or not, that’s how you can even have bribery or blackmail. Right. Blackmail only works if someone actually is worried about something coming out. It feels like we’re in a generation of politicians who, quote unquote, ride it out because they don’t actually feel shame, and so they don’t actually feel like it’s very easy for them to make the argument that they’ve done nothing wrong.
And I think also, first of all, we should note most politicians don’t get into scandals. Most politicians, you know, might feel shame. For all we know, we’re you’re talking about the ones that are scandalized because.
Yeah, I mean, right now Robert Menendez in the New Jersey senator. Is a Democrat. Like he’s going through a scandal of sorts. His take has not been. Wait, you’ve accused me of, like, currying favor with a foreign government? I’m so ashamed. I’m going to take a step back while we figure this out and not distract the party. That’s not the approach.
And I think his defense is very much like the Blagojevich defense, which is this is the system you’ve set up. We have to raise money. And we also our politicians, and we do favors for people.
So the vibe is not shame. Like George Santos is basically like it’s his reality show and we were all just in it for two years. Right. The New York congressman.
But but at the same time, how can you if you’re George Santos and you’re looking around the room and there’s Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Matt Gates and a number of people who have had scandals and are still there and members in good standing and still draw huge crowds when they go before the Republican base. Why would you leave? What did you do comparatively? So I agree with you. I think that there is a shamelessness that has infected a lot of people running for office. I think that is true.
And in that way, does that make Donald Trump the logical conclusion of many lessons of politicians? Right?
He is both cause and effect of this shamelessness because he preceded the Bill Clinton, David Vitter, shamelessness, as a real estate celebrity.
Yeah, where we’re far more forgiving in a lot of ways.
People didn’t care. He was tabloid fodder. But then he became a public figure and a candidate, and he both was a result of what had come before him. And then he also made the problem worse. And so I do think that we are going to see more of it. We’re going to see more scandals. The difference in what we talk about in the scandal series is McGreevey resigned. Blagojevich went to prison. Sanford did not run for reelection, but he came back and ran for the House. Spitzer resigned, and John Edwards did ultimately drop out of the race and has not been in public life since.
So you had your Jar Jar Binks theory? Yes. I had my end of shame theory
I agree with your theory, by the way.
You need to come up with a catchier name for it.
I do. What’s at risk if Americans choose to turn a blind eye? By that, I mean we’re all cynical. We’re all jaded. We’re all over it. Things like the impeachment process of just sort of, like, grind away in the background. It all just seems. partisan and blurry. I think people are now just like all politicians are x, and that makes them kind of numb to scandal.
‘I think that that’s one of the results, is that people take on this very Machiavellian view of who our leaders are. And you can even go back in time and see the personal behavior of John F Kennedy or Doctor Martin Luther King Jr, or others and say, well, they weren’t who they preach to be either. I think there is also, as somebody who has been accused of being self-righteous. I believe in a code of morality. And I know you a little bit, Audie, and I think you do, too. And I still. And I think most people feel that way. Even if, you know, we don’t all measure up.
You’re saying that there are still good people.
Yes. I think I think that there are.
Even after you’ve done an hour about the people who weren’t so good.
I think that there are good people in this business. I mean, I could name some, but then then inevitably they would be scandalized and I would have to eat my words. But I think that that the number of politicians that I know and have covered, I think that they are trying to do the best job they can as people and as public servants.
But even in that joke you just made is the admission there could be something.
I don’t want to speak too fast.
I don’t think Mitt Romney has a girlfriend. Okay, let me put it that way. Like, I mean, but but I will say this. One of the reasons why we put in the Sanford episode where I disclosed that I believed, naively, that he actually was on a hike on the Appalachian Trail. And I, in a private email that was FOIA’d later on, disparaged a journalist who was doing his job and was questioning it.
Why would you think he was hiking?
Because he’s a weird, flaky guy, and I found it very believable.
Maybe because I don’t hike that. I’m like, what? Who would be hiking? That’s crazy. He’s having an affair.
You’re a good person. I like this about you.
I thought that he was. I believed it. Just like I believed that, you know, this long term relationship he had with his wife jenny was full of love and happiness. I watched the Super Bowl with him in 2004. I’d known him for five years. We weren’t friends. We didn’t go out to dinner. But I ran into him. He invited me over. I watched the Super Bowl with his wife and his four sons, and I bought it. I bought it and I was, you know, and but that was also that was as instructive to me as the Lewinsky scandal was.
I mean, I never got I never was close with him.
I mean, you you got because my default setting. Right, because I don’t I wasn’t connected in any way was like, everyone who disappears when they, like, aren’t supposed to disappear. Something’s gone wrong. Yeah. That wrong thing is probably a scandal. Anyone who quits, it’s probably because of a scandal. They’re never spending time with their family. Like, my default setting is very cynical.
You actually have the experience of, as you said, sitting next to this person while they’re in their family environment? That’s going to make you less inclined, right?
I think it’s. I think it’s less that I don’t automatically assume there’s a scandal. I do, and more that because I knew him and I thought he was kind of a flaky guy, that I found the Appalachian Trail excuse believable. I think it’s that because, I mean, if they had said something, maybe if they he said, oh, he’s, you know, he went to, I don’t know, some other ridiculous excuse
I mean, the Appalachian Trail, it was so specific.
But anyway, the important thing is that, like I learned a huge lesson, which is these guys aren’t your friends. You don’t actually know any of them. These are people you cover. These are not people you vouch for. And so that was a very that was a very important lesson for me.
That’s your lesson. What do you hope the viewers will take away from this series?
You know, at the end of the day, a lot of these are real people and there are individual people who did not deserve to have their names destroyed the way they did necessarily. But also, I think it’s just like a it’s a lesson about hubris. They thought they could get away with it. And if you get caught. You’re not going to get away with it. Generally speaking, now, you might survive whatever accountability.
But people will always think of you as, oh, you’re that guy. Some of these people were legitimately in love. Some of these people had secrets. Some of these people were corrupt. Some of these people were in a corrupt system and they were just pushing the boundaries. I think you can make that argument very credibly about Blagojevich or Menendez that we have a really corrupting system.
One thing I took away was that fundamentally, campaigns are stories. Yes, it’s one big story that’s getting told over and over and over again. And you’re telling the voter, come live in this world that I’m describing to you that I can make for you. And when the cracks show in that or when it breaks apart, it’s really jarring. It’s like jarring for the culture, it’s jarring for the for the system in that moment and that that rupture is the scandal.
The first novel I wrote, The Hellfire Club, the main character, Charlie, who’s a congressman, ends up making a compromise in order to get something achieved. And then, like each compromise, requires that he then make another compromise. And that’s something that we see in Washington all the time.
The compromises don’t stop.
They build on each other. They require more compromises. And this the question then becomes, how much are you willing to take? How much are you able to withstand? Some people just walk away. Some people just go full bore. And when you have a secret or you have corrupt intent, then it builds on itself. When we’re coming up with copy to promote the series, somebody wanted me to say something along the lines of how politicians always get caught, why they think they can get away with it, but they always get caught. But I said, I’m not going to say that because I don’t believe that. I think like one fifth of these guys are getting caught. I think we don’t even have any idea of what’s going on. So I think it’s much worse than we even know. That’s how cynical I am.
Okay. You win. That’s not where I thought this was going to land.
But I still think they’re a good people too. I do. I think that both can exist? And I think it’s a it’s difficult and that’s one of the tensions we see in Washington.
CNN chief Washington correspondent Jake Tapper. Now you can watch new episodes of United States of Scandal, Sundays at 9 p.m. eastern at six Pacific on CNN. You can also watch The Lead with Jake Tapper every weekday from 4 to 5 eastern 1pm Pacific. The assignment is a production of CNN audio. This episode was produced by Isoke Samuel. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Our engineer is Michael Hammond. Dan Dzula is our technical director, and Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN audio. We got support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Lenny Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nicole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Thanks, as always to Katie Hinman. I’m Audie Cornish. Thank you for listening.
