Word: misdemeanor
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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James Watt, Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Interior, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for having attempted to mislead the federal grand jury probing an influence-peddling scandal in Reagan's Housing Department. Watt had originally faced a 25-count felony indictment for his role as a housing consultant. Some observers cited the outcome as evidence that the original charges may have been unduly inflated...
...cover up his efforts to win contracts from HUD after leaving the government in 1983. But faced with 18 felony counts for perjury, he acknowledged that he kept documents secret that had been relevant to the grand jury's investigation, and by so doing reduced his charges to one misdemeanor conviction of withholding information. "HUD has been a hotbed of scandal for some two decades," notes TIME's Anne Blackman. "A lot of federal dollars were being spent in some of the poorest areas, and some rather unsavory characters were able to profit by HUD. However, through vouchers and agency...
...find cooperating an appealing alternative to a stretch behind bars. (Almost all counts of the latest indictment are punishable by up to five years in prison.) TIME has learned from attorney Bobby McDaniel that his client Susan McDougal has refused an offer from Starr to plead guilty to a misdemeanor in return for her cooperation. The Administration is now cautiously optimistic that barring another indictee's turning state's evidence, the worst is over...
...bureaucrats, the elites, the counterculture--are, of course, bound by a common trait: none is exactly a central pillar of his constituency. Indeed, a remarkable feature of America's problems, as analyzed in Gingrich's book, is that they are never the fault of Republicans. Even the slightest misdemeanor, if committed by a Republican, turns out to originate in some external cause. For example, Gingrich once saw some Republicans in Congress "grandstand for the news media." (Imagine that!) But it turns out they had been egged on by "liberals in the Washington press corps...
...entire Internet at risk. Exon and Coats revised the bill but left in place the language about using "indecent" words online. "It's a frontal assault on the First Amendment," says Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe. Even veteran prosecutors ridicule it. "It won't pass scrutiny even in misdemeanor court," says...