The history of American politics is, distressingly, indubitably, often hilariously, a chronicle of political scandals. From Monica Lewinsky to Watergate to the Iran-Contra, each crop of politicians has done its bit to play recklessly with the public’s trust and nosedive into the abyss of bribery, corruption and moral peril. So, here you go- these are twelve of the biggest American political scandals.

1. Watergate Scandal.

Of course, there have been many scandals in the United States' presidential history, but none compare to sheer impact with that of the Watergate scandal under the presidency of Richard M. Nixon. Beginning with a break-in at the Democratic headquarters based at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., five members of Nixon's re-election campaign had been caught while attempting to wiretap phones and purloin classified documents. While historians are not sure whether Nixon was aware of the break-in prior to it happening, he still did everything he could to cover up the scandal afterward. The scandal led to the discovery of multiple cases of abuse of power by the Nixon administration. An impeachment process against the president happened which finally led to articles of impeachment and the ultimate resignation of Nixon. When the public ultimately found out, the news shocked the nation and led to a grand disillusionment with the American political system. It has also led to just about every subsequent presidential scandal, both large and small, gaining the suffix “gate,” such as; Whitewatergate, Monicagate, Plamegate, etc.

2. Hillary Clinton Email Scandal.

Of course, everyone's favorite, the Hillary Clinton email scandal. Here's what happened: former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, set up a private email server and a private email network for herself and her family and Huma Abedin, Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. Setting up a private email server prevented her emails from being “accessible” to the federal government and Congress. The private network allowed Clinton, Abedin, and aided Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan to barter emails with the Clinton Foundation, an assortment of world leaders, and Doug Band’s global consulting firm, Teneo Holdings, where Abedin worked during her time at the State Department. The controversy lies in Clinton’s 2009 ethics agreement, leaked on Cryptome, in which she vowed not to coordinate with the Clinton Foundation. The FBI investigation began with one simple surmise, that Hillary Clinton violated the Espionage Act of 1913 by allowing national defense knowledge to be either, “lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed” through “gross negligence.” The Clinton team emails have now ended up in the hands of Julian Assange, a man who lives sequestered in an Ecuadorian embassy, and in the hands of the feds involved in the Anthony Weiner sexting case.

3. Teapot Dome.

The Teapot Dome scandal of the Warren G. Harding administration has long been one of the poster boys of the world of presidential scandals. Harding turned over control of naval oil reserve lands over to the Department of the Interior in 1921, although it was later reversed by the Supreme Court, who ruled the move illegal. Then, Secretary of the Interior, Albert B. Fall, used his new power for personal gain, giving rights to the Teapot Dome Reserve in Wyoming to the Mammoth Oil company in return for bribes. When the scandal broke in 1924 he was found to have accumulated over $100,000 worth of bribes from the Mammoth Oil Company, among others. Although Harding had already died in office prior to the scandal breaking, it became a hot topic in the war of words for years after his death as it continues to plague his now infamous legacy.

4. Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton.

The scandiest of the scandy, in everyone's opinion, is the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton affaire de coeur. During his 1992 run for president, Bill Clinton was hounded by past rumors of extramarital affairs. Some of those rumors hit the tabloids when Flowers, an Arkansas state employee, alleged that she and Clinton carried on a 12-year alliance. Of course, both Bill and Hillary denied the affair ever happening to protect their reputation, but Flowers later declared under oath that the affair had taken place. Fast forward six years later, during a court case about another alleged Clinton affair, America learned of Monica Lewinsky and her claims of a sexual encounter with the former president, Bill Clinton. At first, President Clinton denied the affair, but later he admitted to the country that he had “a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.” Controversy over whether the president perjured himself led to his impeachment trial in the Senate, the first trial in over 130 years. The Senate voted to acquit President Clinton, ending one of the most vociferous episodes in the nation’s history.

5. Iran-Contra.

When you hear "Contra" everybody either thinks of the video game or the counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua- this time, it's Nicaragua. The Reagan-era Iran-Contra affair consisted of two parts: primarily the selling of arms to Iran, despite the embargo to the country, in the hopes of freeing American hostages there and secondly, using the money generated by the sales to aid Contra militants battling the Nicaraguan government. In November of 1986, a Lebanese newspaper printed an exposé on the clandestine activities of the happenings. Soon after, Reagan went on television and denied that any such operation had occurred and he retracted the statement a week later. An investigation by the Reagan-appointed Tower Commission determined that Reagan's hands-off management style had generated conditions which made viable the diversion of funds to the Contras, but found no evidence linking Reagan to the diversion. Just what Reagan knew, continues to be a matter of dynamic speculation until this day. While former President Reagan’s role in the scandal was unclear, he told the nation in a televised address from the Oval Office that the buck “stops with me. I am the one who is ultimately accountable to the American people.” A number of Reagan officials were accused of and charged, but were granted clemency by former President George H. W. Bush, Reagan's successor. Who knows if this is what Ezra Koenig was trying to say when he wrote, "I Think Ur a Contra" for Vampire Weekend- or maybe he was referring to the 1987 Konami video game. It was probably the video game.

6. The Pentagon Papers.

The Pentagon Papers is the classified history of the United States' political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967, as they were commissioned by Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, in 1967. They revealed that under four presidential administrations, from Harry S. Truman to Lyndon B. Johnson, the United States had lied to both Congress and the American public in apropos to the expansion of the war in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. In June of 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a former U.S. Marine and military analyst touched off a constitutional crisis when he leaked the documents to the New York Times, which published portions of the report. The Nixon administration had claimed executive authority to force the New York Times to suspend publication of the classified knowledge in their possession. Yet, this was quickly overthrown by the Supreme Court in a landmark decision for press freedom (New York Times Co. v. The United States), allowing the New York Times and The Washington Post to publish the Pentagon Papers without risk or government censorship. The image above is of Daniel Ellsberg, outside a federal courthouse in 1971, as he’s faced with 12 felony counts as a result of his leak of the Pentagon Papers.

7. The Keating Five.

Before any "How To Get Away With Murder" fans get all riled up, this isn't the same gang. In 1989, five U.S. senators were accused of corruption igniting a major political scandal in America as part of improperly interfering in the investigation of a savings and loans crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The five senators, of whom John McCain is the only one still serving, asked the Federal Home Loan Bank Board not to pursue charges against Lincoln Savings and Loan Association for engaging heavily in risky investments. Charles Keating, who owned the company, acted as a contributor to each of the senator's campaigns. Lincoln Savings later collapsed and required a taxpayer bailout of over $3 billion where many bondholders were defrauded and investors lost life-savings. Keating, ultimately, served a five-year prison sentence for corrupt mismanagement at Lincoln. While all five senators denied any misconduct, they still faced a lengthy two-year investigation. John McCain faced attacks about the scandal during his 2008 run for president.

8. Plamegate.

The Valerie Plame Affair, also known as the “CIA leak scandal” or “Plamegate,” refers to the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA covert agent in a 2003 newspaper column by Robert Novak. Novak had learned of Plame's employment, which was classified information, from State Department official Richard Armitage under the Bush administration. Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson, believed that the Bush administration leaked her status to Novak as payback for a New York Times op-ed in which he charged the administration with manipulating intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction program to justify an invasion of Iraq. A grand jury investigation did not result in the indictment or conviction of anyone for any crime in connection with the leak itself, but Scooter Libby, Chief of Staff for Vice President Dick Cheney, was indicted on one count of obstruction of justice, one count of perjury and three counts making false statements and after a federal trial was sentenced to 30 months in prison, a fine of 250,000 dollars and two years of supervised release. President Bush commuted the sentence but declined to grant a full pardon.

9. Rod Blagojevich Corruption Case.

In 2009, an Illinois congressman, Rod Blagojevich, was charged in a scheme to sell Barack Obama’s former congressional seat to the highest bidder in return for a substantial salary. In recorded conversations, he seemed boastful as he attempted to sell Barack Obama’s senate seat and even weighed aloud appointing himself to the job. His plan didn’t go very well with authorities and on Aug. 17, 2010, he was convicted on one of the 24 federal charges, a charge of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the jury was hung on 23 other counts plus 14 years in prison.

10. Appalachian Trail.

From June 18 until June 24, 2009, the whereabouts of politician Mark Sanford were unheard of to the public, as well as to his wife and the State Law Enforcement Division, which provided security for him, accumulating nationwide news reportage. He had told a member of his staff that he would be hiking the Appalachian Trial but failed to answer any phone calls. Not long afterward, however, journalist Gina Smith ran into him at the airport in Atlanta returning from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Turns out, he had a mistress and was having an extramarital affair with a woman who was later identified as Maria Belén Chapur, an Argentine journalist. Soon after, the phrase, “hiking the Appalachian trail” became a euphemism for a sexual scandal in the English language.

11. Eliot Spitzer.

On March 10, 2008, the New York Times published a report that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer had patronized an escort service by Emperors Club VP and paid up to 80,000 dollars for prostitutes over a period of several years while he was Attorney General, and later as Governor. He arranged to meet at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington D.C. with a prostitute named “Kristen,” who was later revealed to be 22-year-old Ashley Dupré. Spitzer first drew the attention of federal investigators when his bank reported suspicious money transfers, which initially led investigators to believe that Spitzer may have been hiding bribe proceeds. The investigation of the governor led to the discovery of the prostitution ring after which he obviously resigned, seven days after the published report.

12. Donald Trump Tape Scandal.

So you have scandals fueled by greed, sexual scandals, bribery scandals and this, the most disgusting one of all, Donald Trump's Tape Scandal. The Washington Post published a 2005 video clip in which Trump brags about groping women without their consent. In the recording, a video in which Trump can be overheard talking to Billy Bush while on their way to film on the set of a soap opera, Trump is overheard referencing an unnamed woman, he said, “I did try and f*** her, I moved on her like a b****, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump says. Later in the recording, Trump talks about actress Arianne Zucker, who escorted Trump and Bush to the set of “Days of Our Lives.” “I’ve gotta use some Tic Tacs, just in case I start kissing her," Trump says. "You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful, I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait." "And when you’re a star they let you do it. “Grab them by the pussy,” he is heard saying at one point. “You can do anything.”