Agnew quits the vice presidency; pleads no contest to tax evasion
For months Spiro Agnew had denied any wrongdoing while federal prosecutors in Maryland built a case tied to kickbacks he took as Baltimore county executive and governor, payments that kept arriving even after he became vice president. On October 10, 1973, Agnew pleaded no contest to one count of federal income tax evasion for 1967 before Judge Walter E. Hoffman in the Eastern District of Virginia, paid a $10,000 fine, and resigned effective that same day. Attorney General Elliot Richardson's office had recommended no prison time. Nixon chose House Republican leader Gerald Ford to replace him.
Agnew became the first vice president to leave office under criminal pressure rather than death or election, a gap that put the Twenty-Fifth Amendment's untested confirmation process into play for the first time. His exit cleared the path for Gerald Ford, an accidental vice president who would soon become an accidental president.
QWho was the only other vice president to resign before Agnew, and why?
John C. Calhoun walked away from the vice presidency in 1832, becoming the first man to do so. Unlike Agnew, Calhoun faced no criminal investigation. He resigned over a political falling-out with President Andrew Jackson, worsened by the Peggy Eaton social scandal and by Calhoun's support for South Carolina's doctrine of nullification, which held that states could void federal laws they deemed unconstitutional. Calhoun then took a Senate seat from South Carolina to keep fighting for his states' rights positions from the floor of Congress. For 141 years Calhoun's resignation stood alone in the history books. Agnew's departure in 1973 gave the vice presidency its second resignation, but the first ever driven by a federal prosecutor's case rather than a policy dispute.
QWho did Agnew blame for engineering his downfall?
In the years after leaving office, Agnew publicly insisted that Zionists had conspired to force him out, a claim he repeated in interviews and writings even as the government's case rested on documented kickback payments from Maryland contractors. He rarely appeared in public afterward, channeling his version of events instead into a memoir and a novel, both of which defended his record and his innocence. The accusation found little support beyond his own circle and did nothing to reopen the closed case. Prosecutors maintained throughout that the case was a straightforward matter of cash changing hands for contracts, not a political vendetta.
QWhat job was Judge Walter E. Hoffman doing in Virginia when he took on Agnew's case?
Hoffman normally sat on the federal bench in the Eastern District of Virginia, but he heard Agnew's plea while sitting by designation, a legal arrangement that lets a judge from one court handle a case assigned outside his usual jurisdiction. The arrangement kept the proceeding away from Maryland, where the underlying kickback scheme had played out across Agnew's years as county executive and governor. It gave the final act of the investigation a venue separate from the place where the alleged crimes occurred. The choice of Hoffman, brought in specifically for this purpose, shows how carefully the final plea hearing was staged to move quickly and cleanly through the federal courts.
