I’m sure you’ve heard that they made Jimmy Carter give up his peanut farm when he became president. It’s become a common punch line in light of Donald Trump’s flagrant corruption. But there are details about that peanut farm issue that are worth remembering. The historian Kevin Kruse wrote about it in his book “Presidential Misconduct” and excerpted it in his newsletter today, noting just how far we’ve come in norms since then:
Distancing himself from Washington D.C., Carter presented himself as the antithesis of its political culture of cronyism and corruption. This “outsider” trope became more common in the wake of the Watergate crisis of the Nixon administration, but Carter laid an early claim to the territory. “The strongest feeling in this country today,” an adviser noted in a 1972 memorandum, “is the general distrust of government and politicians at all levels. The desire and thrust for strong moral leadership was not satisfied with the election of Richard Nixon.”[2] Accordingly, Carter worked to associate himself with the values of trust, honesty, integrity, and responsibility. “I will never make a misleading statement,” he promised voters. “I will never tell a lie or avoid a controversy. I will never let you down.”[3]
After he won the presidency, Carter immediately worked to make his promises manifest. In January 1977, he announced that he was placing his interest in his family’s farm and peanut warehouse into a blind trust. Moreover, the President-elect made it clear that he expected everyone in his administration to follow his personal example. The Carter White House soon instituted stricter rules for financial disclosures and conflicts of interest and worked to curb the practice of “revolving-door” government, in which officials left office and then went to work for businesses in the industries they had dealt with in their government roles. The new ethics rules, Press Secretary Jody Powell explained, were meant “to restore the confidence of the American people in their own government.”[4] …..
Upon taking office, Carter had placed his share of the family-owned peanut warehouse—62 percent—in a blind trust under the control of Atlanta lawyer Charles H. Kirbo. The remainder was maintained by Carter’s mother Lillian and his younger brother Billy (as he was commonly called), who oversaw daily operations. Over the course of 1977, the business fell on hard times, partially due to an unwise expansion of operations and partially due to a drought that hurt local crops. The President’s blind trust lost more than $300,000 during that period, and Kirbo soon announced that he was looking to sell the warehouse entirely.[11]
The attention to the failing family enterprise brought to the surface details about past mismanagement of the warehouse and concerns about possible misappropriation of funds. In November 1978, newspapers reported that the National Bank of Georgia, under Bert Lance’s direction, had lent Carter’s Warehouse $1 million without full collateral. Further inquiries in January 1979 revealed that Lance had also, in early 1976, directed bank officials to lower interest rates on loans and lines of credit to Carter’s Warehouse totaling nearly $4 million in all. While the issuing of the loans came under scrutiny, so did the terms of their repayment. In March 1979, a former bonded warehouseman who was employed by NBG to supervise the collateral on the warehouse loan reported that, at Billy Carter’s direction, he had sent misleading reports to the bank. It soon became clear that the warehouse was roughly $500,000 behind in its repayment schedule.[12]
Though the President had divested himself from the business, these reports raised questions about his possible role in securing the loan and, soon, questions about whether any money from the loan had been diverted to his 1976 presidential campaign. On March 20, 1979, with pressure for a full investigation mounting, Attorney General Griffin Bell appointed former U.S. Attorney Paul J. Curran, a New York Republican, to serve as Special Counsel to investigate the loans. (Initially, Curran’s powers fell short of those of a special prosecutor as outlined in the recently passed Ethics in Government Act of 1978, the post-Watergate legislation that instituted new policies and procedures for investigations of the executive branch. Under pressure from Republicans in Congress, Bell expanded Curran’s authority and effectively made him a special prosecutor in everything but name.)[13]
The Special Counsel’s investigation unfolded over seven months during the summer of 1979. “I want to do the investigation as quickly as possible,” Curran told reporters, “but obviously it has to be thorough.” The Special Counsel’s legal team reviewed 80,000 documents and took grand jury testimony from 64 witnesses, including Billy Carter. Most significantly, President Carter himself provided a sworn deposition in an interview that lasted four hours, marking the first time in American history that a sitting president was interviewed under oath in a criminal investigation. “Curran is looking for the smoking peanut, if there is one,” a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution noted, “and if there isn’t, he wants to be very sure.”[14]
In October 1979, the Special Counsel issued his findings in a 179-page public report. Curran concluded that there was no evidence that any money had been diverted from Carter’s Warehouse to the Carter presidential campaign. Moreover, he declared that, while he was not “exonerating” Billy Carter, he had found no grounds for federal criminal charges over the handling of the NBG loans at the warehouse either. Asked how it felt to be declared “clean,” the President responded: “I knew it all the time.”[15]
How quaint. I don’t think I have to dredge up the $38,000 Whitewater scandal which similarly turned up nothing after tens of millions of dollars and years of shrieking about corruption. And, of course, the “Clinton Cash” bullshit along with the “Biden Crime Family.” You’ll notice that they’re all Democrats.
Trump believes he is immune from all this and he’s right. I don’t know why.
Rick Perlstein’s Reaganland goes into the Carter story as well and it’s really good.