Bag Man, the crimes of Spiro Agnew

If you lived through the Watergate scandal in the 1970s, or if you know much about it, you will remember that Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon’s vice president, resigned his office in October 1973 because he faced criminal charges that had nothing to do with anything involving Watergate.

The Agnew episode has come to be regarded as just that, an episode in the larger story that was taking place at the time.

But Rachel Maddow and her crew at MSNBC have come along to remind us that the Agnew thing was more than an episode. It was a full-blown, republic-challenging crisis, and there are things yet to be discovered about it.

They dug into it and developed a podcast, Bag Man, out of what they found, and you can find it at the link below:

Is it possible for an American Vice President to carry out a criminal enterprise inside the White House and have nobody remember? To have one of the most brazen political bribery scandals in American history play out before the country while nobody’s paying attention? In her first original podcast, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow goes back 45 years to dig into a story that got overshadowed in its day. Source: Bag Man: A Rachel Maddow podcast from MSNBC

The podcast is a couple of years old, but a book, Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House, has been recently published based on what Maddow and her producer found, a book that the Washington Post review says is a  “case study in how the democratic ideal of equal justice under the law collides with the squalid realities of America’s political system.”

The podcast episodes are fascinating and easy to listen to, and you will come to believe that what happened back then resonates loudly today.