“Is it Goldstein again?” Richard Nixon demanded.
In July of 1971, the president was infuriated that an unnamed official at the Bureau of Labor Statistics had seemed to downplay the administration’s progress on reducing unemployment while briefing reporters. His suspicions fell on Harold Goldstein, the longtime civil servant and BLS official in charge of the jobs numbers, who had attracted his ire for other comments earlier in the year.
With more than 100,000 people casting a vote against the incumbent president in the Democratic primary last week in Michigan, a swing state essential to his reelection, the wisdom of Joe Biden’s decision to face voters in November is again under intense scrutiny. Historically speaking, it isn’t too late for President Joe Biden to voluntarily drop his reelection bid.
No former president of the United States has ever been indicted at either the federal or state level. That more-than-two-centuries-old record, if you want to call it that, looks like it could soon be broken—something that should have happened a long time ago.A few American presidents have certainly behaved questionably enough to meet the standard of probable cause needed for an indictment.