Rachel Maddow Presents – BagMan – Episode 5: Double-Header (transcribed by Sonix)

Rachel Maddow: Democratic Congressman Carl Albert of Oklahoma was not a big man. He said that he was 5-foot-4, but that was widely acknowledged to be a stretch. One reporter, who himself was 5-foot-5 wrote a story once estimating that Carl Albert's true height was probably more like 4- foot-11. But when House Speaker Sam Rayburn handpicked Carl Albert to be his successor, he said about Albert, "I can tell big timber from small brush." And so, in 1973, small-in-stature Carl Albert was the biggest that Congress got. He was Speaker of the House.

Carl Albert: Hopefully, we get together, and work for the country, and not work for the two political parties.

Rachel Maddow: Carl Albert was a Democrat. The Republicans might have held the White House, but after the President and the Vice President, it was House Speaker Carl Albert, who was next in the line of succession. So, he was second in line to the presidency. And it was that last part, second in line to the presidency, that started weighing on Carl Albert that summer of Watergate in 1973.

Sam Ervin: The Committee will come to order. And I would like to-

Rachel Maddow: If you're the House Speaker in normal times, the idea that you might one day actually have to assume the Presidency, I mean, it's technically true, but it's pretty inconceivable. It's never going to happen. But if you were House speaker in 1973, with a President in Richard Nixon who was crippled by Watergate, and a Vice President in Spiro Agnew who was the subject of a major criminal bribery and extortion investigation, the idea that you as speaker might one day have to become President, that was starting to feel less and less theoretical all the time.

Rachel Maddow: And so, House Speaker Carl Albert decided he needed to cover his bases. He needed to get prepared. In secret, he reached out to one of the great wise men of Washington, a man who had been one of President John F. Kennedy's closest advisers, Ted Sorensen.

Erkek sesi: I once heard somebody say that when Mr. Kennedy is wounded, Sorensen bleeds. Is that so?

John F. Kennedy: Well, we've been very close, and he's been extremely …

Rachel Maddow: In 1973, House Speaker Carl Albert asked Ted Sorensen to draft him a confidential memo, a memo that would basically give Carl Albert a step-by-step manual for how to be president, in a pinch. How much time he should give the outgoing president to clear his stuff out of the White House? Where and when Carl Albert would take the Presidential oath? What he should say to the nation in his first public address?

Rachel Maddow: Ted Sorensen advised the Speaker that this memo should probably be destroyed if it ever became unnecessary. But there was good reason, at the time, to expect that it might well be necessary because Carl Albert really might end up becoming President, all in a hurry, because of what was going on with Nixon and Agnew.

Rachel Maddow: And Carl Albert was not the only one thinking that. Inside the White House that summer, Richard Nixon's inner circle started seeing their scandals and their troubles in a new, conspiratorial light. What if the Democratic Congress, led by little Carl Albert, what if they were quietly planning to wage a coup?

Rachel Maddow: The sudden ousting of President Nixon and Vice President Agnew. The installation of Democrat Carl Albert as the brand new President. Nixon's Chief of Staff at the time, Al Haig, was a little freaked out by that possibility. And that's, in part, because he knew what kind of trouble Nixon was in. By that summer of 1973, Al Haig had become a nightly sounding board for President Nixon's, sometimes, drunken, often paranoid, late-night phone calls about Watergate.

Richard Nixon: You see, the real problem, though, is me, because the goddamn thing has gotten to me, you see, you know, and because of the personal factors. And you get to the point, you know, that, well, if you can't do the goddamn job, you better put somebody in there that can.

Al Haig: There's no one that can.

Rachel Maddow: Al Haig was already concerned about Nixon's ability to survive Watergate. And Haig knew about Agnew's troubles too. He had been in on White House conversations about that trouble from the beginning. And then, in the summer of 1973, Haig got a visit from Attorney General Eliot Richardson who told him, in no uncertain terms, that Agnew was staring down the barrel of a 40-count federal indictment on bribery and extortion charges.

Rachel Maddow: Haig later wrote about that conversation with Attorney General Richardson. He said, "In my own mind, two words formed, double impeachment. I am not subject to visions, but as Richardson left my office, a vivid picture grew in my mind of the President and the Vice President of the United States, both charged with high crimes and misdemeanors, side by side on trial together before the Senate."

Rachel Maddow: What happens when you have a criminal occupant of the White House, make that two criminals in the White House, both implicated in serious crimes, but also protected by the officers that they hold? What are your options for saving the country from that?

Rachel Maddow: Bag Man'i dinliyorsunuz. Ben sunucunuz Rachel Maddow.

Erkek sesi: Good evening. The possibility that Vice President Agnew may resign was Topic A in Washington today.

Richard Nixon: My confidence in his integrity has not been shaken.

Ron Liebman: It was only a matter of time before Spiro Agnew became President of the United States.

Barney Skolnik: The country must have him out of the Vice Presidency.

John Chancellor: We're in for what only can be called the nasty chapter in the history of this country.

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Rachel Maddow: Episode 5: Double-Header.

Erkek sesi: Vice President Agnew appeared suddenly in the office of House Speaker Carl Albert in late afternoon with a letter to the Speaker. The letter asked that he be investigated by the House. Here's what the letter says-

Rachel Maddow: It's not often that a politician wants to be impeached. But in September of 1973, the Vice President of the United States desperately wanted that.

John Chancellor: What the Vice President seems to be doing is charting a course, which could lead close to impeachment.

Rachel Maddow: The reason impeachment looked pretty good to the Vice President that fall was because he and his lawyers thought him getting impeached would actually be a better bet than the Justice Department criminal indictment that they were pretty sure was otherwise coming his way.

Martin London: Every criminal lawyer knows that the first thing you do, if you can, is to avoid an indictment.

Rachel Maddow: Marty London was a criminal defense lawyer and a good one. He made a career out of keeping his sometimes very famous clients from being indicted. But that fall in 1973, Marty London had a lawyer's dream. He had a client who was maybe unindictable by virtue of the job that he held.

Martin London: We took the position that you couldn't indict Agnew because he was a sitting Vice President.

Rachel Maddow: If other Presidents and Vice Presidents ever need a checklist of things to do to try to survive a big White House scandal, Spiro Agnew wrote them a pretty good first draft in 1973, deny everything, denounce the investigators, mess with the investigators, build yourself an army of supporters, threaten the press, and work them as hard as you can. But the final item on his checklist, his last ditch effort to survive, was this argument that even if the Justice Department had cold hard evidence of his crimes, even if, he still couldn't be indicted anyway, simply because he was Vice President. And that was a live issue back in 1973. It's still alive issue today.

Erkek sesi: Mr. Agnew's lawyers are expected to argue that the Constitution prohibits the indictment of a Vice President before he is impeached and removed from office. He will try to use his office as a shield against indictment, and he hopes-

Rachel Maddow: What Spiro Agnew started arguing that fall of 1973 was bold. He basically demanded that the Congress, the Democratic-led Congress, must investigate him. His argument was that if anyone had the power to remove him from office, it wasn't the Justice Department. It was only Congress. So, they could go ahead and try that. Bring it on. Agnew's top political aide at the time was David Keene.

David Keene: He, sort of, famously wanted to be impeached because, first of all, he said, "All those guys up there done the same thing, and I just want them to look me in the face," you know. So, they could hear the charges, and then he could have, as he said, "a jury of my peers" decide on it.

Rachel Maddow: At the height of the controversy, at the height of the fight, Spiro Agnew personally went to Congress and asked the Democrats in control at the time, including House Speaker Carl Albert and Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino, to please start hearings investigating him.

David Keene: I forget who had to deliver the letter to Peter Rodino, who read the letter and then said, "Go tell your client to fuck himself." That was a clue, Ted. They weren't going to go with this.

Rachel Maddow: Spiro Agnew was trying to set up a lifeline. If he could get the Congress to try to impeach him, (A), That could brush back the Justice Department, so they'd forget about trying to indict him since Congress was handling it instead' (B), Impeachment was a process he thought he might just survive. In fact, he was pretty sure he would survive it. For exactly those reasons, the impeachment option was a real problem for Attorney General Eliot Richardson. It did offer an avenue for Agnew to potentially survive and stay in office as an active extortionist and a crook. That was not going to be okay.

Rachel Maddow: But it was an even bigger problem for President Richard Nixon. This was the fall of 1973. Nixon's White House Counsel, John Dean, had flipped. Nixon had lost two Attorneys General and a White House Chief of Staff. He was being investigated, not only in Congress in those blockbuster televised hearings, but also by an aggressive special counsel too.

Rachel Maddow: By then, the Congress had learned there were tapes of all of his Oval Office discussions and phone calls he had already, at that point, been ordered to hand over those tapes. And still, with all of that, Congress wasn't even moving to impeach Nixon yet. In the fall of 1973, that was still months away. And here was Nixon's own Vice President begging to get impeached, trying to get the gears of impeachment moving in Congress? That was a disastrous prospect for Nixon.

Rachel Maddow: Richard Nixon, up until that point, had been supporting his Vice President. He'd been complicit, frankly, in what looks very much like a criminal effort to obstruct the Agnew investigation behind the scenes. When he was asked about his Vice President in public, he was nothing but supportive.

Richard Nixon: My confidence in his integrity has not been shaken. And, in fact, it has been strengthened by his courageous conduct and his ability.

Rachel Maddow: But when Spiro Agnew started calling around trying to get himself impeached instead of indicted, Nixon started to realize that these efforts to save the Vice President posed an existential threat to the President, to himself. And so, Richard Nixon in that moment turned on Spiro Agnew.

Rachel Maddow: His Chief of Staff, Al Haig, who was worried about a coup by the Democrats, Nixon sent him to tell Agnew to resign. Agnew says he resisted multiple efforts from various Nixon aides trying to force his resignation. He wanted Nixon to ask for it himself. He later wrote that Nixon, "resisted dealing with any personal crisis on a man-to-man basis.".

Rachel Maddow: The relationship between Nixon and Agnew broke down. Agnew, at one point, actually considered vacating the office space that he had in the White House, and instead moving into his ceremonial office down the street at the Senate. The President and the Vice President, they were now effectively at war with each other.

John Chancellor: The relationship between Mr. Agnew and his President seems to be in grave disrepair. In truth, both men are in bed trouble tonight because their problems are becoming entwined, legally and politically. We're in for what only can be called a nasty chapter in the history of this country.

Rachel Maddow: This was the sort of crisis the country had never seen before, a criminal President and a criminal Vice President, both on the verge of going down, both clinging to power desperately, and now turning against each other to try to do so. And it was all on one man's shoulders to try to resolve this crisis in a way that didn't throw the country and the government into utter chaos. That's next.

Chris Hayes: Hey, it's MSNBC's Chris Hayes. If you enjoyed Bag Man, be sure to check out my friend, Rachel Maddow, on my podcast, Why is This Happening?", where I get the opportunity to dig deep into the forces behind the stories playing out in the news in order to understand why certain cultural and political phenomena came to be. Rachel joins me to talk about covering the news in this unprecedented political moment. We also talk all about Bag Man and how this incredible podcast came to be. So, click on over and check out Why is This Happening? And you can listen now wherever you get your podcasts.

Rachel Maddow: How exactly do you remove from office a criminal in the White House? It's one of those things that, in theory, shouldn't be all that difficult, right? We all know no one's above the law. That's the cliche, and it's supposed to be true. But when you have someone in the White House, a President and/or a Vice President implicated in crimes, what's the mechanism to get him out?

Rachel Maddow: That was the question facing Attorney General Eliot Richardson in the fall of 1973. Watergate, of course, was threatening to take down the President. But Elliot Richardson now had cold hard evidence that the Vice President was implicated in crimes as well. And there really was no sure way to get him out. Spiro Agnew had been attacking the investigation into him as a witch hunt. He was arguing that he couldn't be indicted even if the Justice Department wanted to indict him. And there was a reasonable, though not exactly sure argument that he might have been right about that.

Rachel Maddow: The other remedy was the one that Agnew actually wanted, an effort at impeachment. But relying on Congress to do that job was also taking a chance. And so, Elliot Richardson had to decide what to do with this criminal in the White House, who was not going to leave willingly, and who was now just one bad Watergate development away from becoming President himself. Here's prosecutor Ron Liebman.

Ron Liebman: It was only a matter of time before Spiro Agnew became President of the United States. It was a period of months, maybe weeks.

Rachel Maddow: Elliot Richardson, with some urgency, needed to come up with a way to get the Vice President out before the President went down. What Elliot Richardson decided to do that fall was controversial, to say the least. He would call Agnew's bluff about whether a sitting President or Vice President could be indicted. He would go ahead and threaten the Vice President with the weight of the criminal law.

Rachel Maddow: But then, he would offer him a way out. They could negotiate behind closed doors to trade the one thing Agnew most wanted for the one thing the Attorney General most wanted. Elliot Richardson would offer Agnew a one-time-only, golden opportunity to save his own skin in exchange for Agnew getting out of the White House.

Rachel Maddow: Now, there was no guarantee this would work. Agnew and his lawyers were crowing that the Justice Department had no power over a Vice President at all. They couldn't indict him if they wanted to. But did Agnew really trust in that? Did he and his lawyers want to test the Justice Department on that by seeing them try it?

Rachel Maddow: The Attorney General quietly brought Agnew's legal team into his own office at the Justice Department to start secret negotiations. And it turned out that whatever Agnew's lawyers were selling publicly about Agnew not needing to fear any criminal charges, when they got behind closed doors, they were willing to deal. They clearly did fear of the prospect of charges against Agnew, and conviction, and sentencing. And they had a trade in mind to avoid all of that. Here's Marty London again, one of Agnew's lawyers.

Martin London: The Vice President's condition was he would resign only if he could do so with no possibility of confinement, and he could resign with dignity. Those were the two conditions: dignity and no confinement. We were not willing to agree to anything that involved a prison term. And that was a rock principle.

Rachel Maddow: For Attorney General Eliot Richardson, the overriding objective here was to get Agnew out of the line of succession as swiftly as possible. Agnew's lawyers were now offering that he would resign. But their insistence on no jail time, no confinement, that was a hard sell to Richardson's own side. The Attorney General's own team of these young Baltimore prosecutors who had built a truly slam dunk case against Agnew, they didn't want to let Agnew off the hook. Here's Prosecutor Barney Skolnik.

Barney Skolnik: What applied for me was what I saw as the very detrimental message that emanates from his not going to jail. People who do this shit should go to jail. So, why doesn't he? There's no good answer to that. The message if he doesn't go to jail is that if you're big enough, if you're powerful enough, you don't get treated like everybody else. And, to me, it was all about you know equal treatment. People who pay bribes to public officials, or public officials who take them should go to jail. They do go to jail. So, there's no good reason why he shouldn't.

Rachel Maddow: These prosecutors could see the national interest in getting Agnew out of the White House, but they were also standing on principle, that bedrock American principle that no one's above the law.

Rachel Maddow: As prosecutors, they pursued public corruption cases specifically to expose and end corruption in American governance, to throw corrupt public officials in jail. And they didn't think that Spiro Agnew should be treated any differently just because he was a very high ranking public official. Here's Prosecutor Tim Baker with producer Mike Yarvitz.

Tim Baker: Everybody seemed to want different things.

Mike Yarvitz: And what did you want?

Tim Baker: I wanted jail. Barney wanted admission. Barney wanted the son of a bitch to admit it.

Mike Yarvitz: But you wanted jail.

Tim Baker: You bet I did, really.

Mike Yarvitz: For what reason?

Tim Baker: Well, that's what he deserved. It was egregious conduct.

Mike Yarvitz: Was it something like a symbolic day in jail?

Tim Baker: No, no, no, no, no, no. A couple years. This is terrible conduct. I thought he was a really bad man, and he shouldn't have ever been Vice President.

Rachel Maddow: Elliot Richardson had these prosecutors on one side who were pushing hard for jail, and they had brought the hard evidence before a grand jury to justify that stance. On the other side, he had lawyers for the Vice President standing firm that jail was off the table. And then, there were still other issues that remained unresolved, including what Agnew would actually have to plead guilty to if he was going to plead guilty as part of a deal to make the other charges go away. And while those negotiations were going on, they all knew that at any moment, Spiro Agnew could become President of the United States if they didn't figure this out fast.

Barney Skolnik: We're all sitting around talking together about how to handle this grave constitutional crisis thing. So, it's this one guy in his 50s and a bunch of 30-year-olds, you know, sitting around, talking about what to do for the country. I mean, it was, you know. That's why I get sort of emotional about it. It was, without question, the most intense professional experience of my life, and I had, you know, a few of them.

Rachel Maddow: The secret negotiations between the Attorney General and the Vice President, at this point, leaked to the press. Elliot Richardson was up against the clock. He sent his head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department, a man named Henry Peterson, to go meet with Agnew's lawyers one more time. This time, in the presence of the federal judge who had been assigned to the case.

Rachel Maddow: To try to avoid the press, the group assembled in secret at a location chosen by the judge specifically to avoid press scrutiny. It was a spot they figured reporters would never suspect. It was a single room in a random motel in suburban. Virginia Agnew's attorney, Marty London, was instructed by the judge to meet there and tell no one. ***

Martin London: He says, "Nobody knows. Nobody in the press knows about this. This is a secret." And we were given specific instructions "If when you get to this motel, and you see the press, you don't go in. You call me. Here's the number of my motel room." Well, we don't have cell phones, so we drive there. Man, the parking lot's full of cameras, reporters, it's a mob scene.

Martin London: We tell the taxi cab driver, "Don't turn it in. Keep going. Take us to the nearest gas station," where we go to a pay station, and we call the judge, and say, "Your parking lot is chock a block full of reporters." And he is pissed. He said, "I know. I know all about it. It's too late to do anything about it. Come ahead."

Martin London: We go ahead, and we go into this motel room. Now, he didn't reserve a conference room. This was an inexpensive motel bedroom. And the room has twin beds. And we're sitting on the inside of one bed, and Henry, Peterson, and George Beall, and another assistant were sitting on the other bed. They're looking at each other, and down at the end between the two beds is, sitting, the judge in a desk chair. And we're negotiating what we can.

Martin London: It's a very awkward circumstance when we wanted to caucus. The judge said. "Well, why don't you guys go in the bathroom?" So, we went to the bathroom. but the bathroom had no phone. I mean, this wasn't a high-end place. So, he said, "Go next door, my wife's room, she's in the movies." We went next door, we caucused. I don't remember whether made a phone call or not. And we resolved what we could. We were getting there.

Rachel Maddow: They were getting there, but they weren't there yet. After all of the meetings in Elliot Richardson's office, after the secret motel meeting in Virginia, the key sticking point remained, whether the Vice President of the United States would be locked up for the crimes that he had committed. Agnew's defense team was holding the Vice Presidency as a bargaining chip over that one remaining issue.

Martin London: You're talking about the Vice President of the United States. We really gave no thought to negotiating the issue of confinement. It wasn't — I mean, not not a minute. It was not — As far as we were concerned, it was not on the table.

Rachel Maddow: It was the first week of October 1973, President Nixon was under enormous strain, teetering not just on the edge of criminal liability in the Watergate crisis, but some of the people closest to him believed he was teetering in terms of his own sanity. Attorney General Eliot Richardson decided that what mattered most to the country was that Vice President Spiro Agnew had to be removed from the line of succession before it was too late.

Rachel Maddow: And because of that simple singular priority, Elliot Richardson, in that moment, he gave him. He gave in on the issue of jail time over the objections of these prosecutors who worked for him and who had built this bulletproof case against the Vice President. He traded away the prospect of jail time for Agnew in exchange for the Vice President's immediate resignation from office.

Tim Baker: Got to get this guy out of the Vice Presidency. He always thought that was the most important thing to get. That had to be done. The other things were important, but they didn't have to be done: jail, guilty plea. What absolutely had to be done, he had to be gotten out of the line of succession.

Ron Liebman: He was as disgusted as we were that that, here's another crook, you know, that happens to be the Vice President this time. He was disgusted by that. But he also knew, more so because of his experience and his age than we did, I think, that resignation was more important in the context of the time than any of the other considerations.

Barney Skolnik: It had to do with the country. It had to do with the the top priority importance to the country of getting him out of the Vice Presidency. That the country must have him out of the Vice Presidency.

Rachel Maddow: Ever feel like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders? Think about Elliot Richardson in this moment. Nixon and Agnew had been re-elected in a landslide less than a year earlier. Elliot Richardson, alone, was making a decision to effectively reverse the overwhelming will of the voters. The Vice President would not get his day in court. He would not even get his day in front of Congress. He would be forced from office by the Attorney General.

Rachel Maddow: In exchange for that resignation, Richardson knew he was letting Agnew off the hook in a big way. Years and years of brazen corruption as a public official, including taking bribes and shaking people down from inside the White House, it was all going to be overlooked. Agnew would get away with it. No jail. He'd just walk away. He wouldn't even have to pay back the money. That's a heck of a controversial decision for one person to make. But Elliot Richardson made that call in opposition to his own prosecutors like Barney Skolnik who wanted jail.

Barney Skolnik: I had been the the vocal out front, and with the — Arrogance, I like to think, is too strong a word, but something close to the arrogance of a 32-year-old prosecutor. I had been — I had sat around that table on four or five separate occasions over a period of a couple of months. And I had waxed eloquent about equal treatment under the law, and how, as a matter of grand principle, I was standing in opposition to us sending a message that if you do this kind of stuff, you go to jail unless you're big and powerful. Because I had this, you know, role in all of that, it was very hard for me to, ultimately, say, "I think he's right," but there came a point at which I thought he was right.

Rachel Maddow: How do you remove a criminal from the White House? By giving him a deal to just walk away. The Vice President would not be hung in the public square with a major bribery and extortion trial. He would be prosecuted ever so briefly on a minor count of tax evasion to which he would plead no contest, but he would be removed from office because that was the national imperative. That was the deal. And, now, it was just a matter of making that happen. And not in like a few weeks or a few months, but tomorrow, literally within 24 hours of that deal being reached.

Martin London: You know, you don't wait. Just because you have a deal now doesn't mean you're going to have a deal in three days. You let three days go by, then the leaks come in, and the boat gets lower and lower in the water, and then it turns turtle. So, if you have a deal now, you make your deal, and you do it. And he was very clear about that. Once we had a deal, he said, those are his words, "The Agnew case is over. We'll do it tomorrow."

Rachel Maddow: This would have to happen with lightning speed because they couldn't risk anything happening to upend the deal. In the end, it wouldn't be clear until the actual last minute, the last 60 seconds, that it definitely was going to happen.

Martin London: It's now 2:00, and I am sweating because somebody is from this play is missing.

Ron Liebman: I think what we were concerned was, you know, he gets in the court, and he says, "Well, wait a minute. I changed my mind. I'm immune from prosecution. Marshal, could you unlock that door please? I got to go."

Rachel Maddow: That part of the story is next time. I'm Rachel Maddow, and this is Bag Man.

Rachel Maddow: Bagman is a production of MSNBC and NBC Universal. This series is executive produced by Mike Yarvitz. It was written by myself and Mike Yarvitz. Editorial and production support from Jonathan Hirsch and Marissa Schneiderman from Neon Hum Media. And you can find much more about the story on our website, which is MSNBC.com/Bagman.

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