In a year marked by private email shenanigans and undercover videos, political scandals that might have shocked the public any other time seemed relatively tame.
But public figures from all levels were up to no good in 2015, wasting taxpayer money and trying to cover their tracks at every turn.
While this timeline of scandals doesn’t begin to cover all the political bad behavior that transpired in Washington this year, it does provide a window into what some leaders will do when they think no one is watching.
First lady of Oregon’s conflict of interest
Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber was forced from his post in February after months of scrutiny over the role of his fiancee, Cylvia Hayes, in his official administration.
Hayes, an environmental activist, ran a private consulting firm that represented clients whose business intersected with the state government. Critics accused Kitzhaber of allowing his fiancee to use her access to Oregon’s highest office in service to her clients, a practice many saw as a blatant conflict of interest.
Oregonians heightened their calls for the Democratic governor’s resignation after Hayes refused to release emails related to her role as the state’s first lady even though the attorney general had ordered her to make them public.
Four days before Kitzhaber stepped down, the attorney general announced she had opened a criminal investigation into the allegations of corruption surrounding the governor’s office. That was in addition to a review already in progress by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission.
Kitzhaber made history by becoming the only Oregon governor to resign amid scandal, in addition to his standing as the state’s longest-serving governor.
Schocking expenditures
Rep. Aaron Schock resigned in March over questions about his office decorations that spiraled into a national scandal.
The Illinois Republican’s woes began in February when a Washington Post reporter inquired about the “Downton Abbey” theme of Schock’s lavishly-appointed office.
“[S]ometimes, a friendly outsider can inadvertently ruin a communications director’s day,” wrote Ben Terris, the Post reporter who touched off the firestorm that cost Schock his seat, in a Feb. 2 story about an awkward encounter with the congressman’s press wrangler.
Journalists soon began poring over Schock’s financial records for evidence of impropriety. They raised questions about his use of taxpayer and campaign funds to charter jets, purchase concert tickets and to reimburse himself for driving more miles in his official capacity than were even on his car’s odometer.
While Schock initially attempted to make amends for his frivolous spending by hiring a third party to track his expenses, he folded under the pressure of a congressional ethics probe and a seemingly endless onslaught of headlines about his political expenditures.
Tax-delinquent feds
An Internal Revenue Service report made public in March revealed more than 100,000 federal employees had evaded all or part of their taxes in 2014, costing taxpayers $1.4 billion.
The amount of revenue loss to tax-delinquent government workers had hit a ten-year high, according to the controversial report.
Yet all 113,805 civilian government employees named in the review kept their taxpayer-funded jobs despite failing to pay their own taxes.
The report sparked widespread outrage and prompted House Republicans to put forward a bill that would have given federal officials the power to fire government employees who are delinquent on their taxes. That bill failed to clear the House in April.
Democrats reportedly argued that the bill unfairly targeted federal employees over private ones.
Hillary’s email-gate
Hillary Clinton’s email scandal eclipsed every other political controversy this year in interest and intensity after the slow drip of revelations about her use of a private email server threatened to hobble her presidential campaign.
Critics contend Clinton used a personal server to hide her communications from the public, although the former secretary of state first argued in March that she had set the system up at her Chappaqua, N.Y. home because she wanted to carry just one device for both personal and official emails.
Within hours, reporters had dredged up photographs of Clinton using multiple mobile devices, rendering her defense useless. She has not offered an alternative explanation.
Even so, the public’s appetite for stories about the Clinton email saga has waned. Thousands of pages of her emails have been published by the State Department at the end of each month since May, but her poll numbers have bounced back from the hit they took at the height of the controversy in the summer and early fall.
Clinton’s campaign has attempted to muddy the water on the issue of the classified materials found within her records. While her campaign has argued the hundreds of classified emails released so far were only designated as such after they were sent or received, the intelligence community maintains several were classified when they were written.
Clinton also faces an FBI investigation into whether she mishandled classified material on her personal server, a charge she denies. She remains the Democratic frontrunner for president.
Clinton Foundation’s foreign funds
Just as new information about her private email use was bubbling to the surface on a daily basis this spring, Clinton began taking heat on an unrelated matter: contributions to her family’s philanthropic empire.
The controversy over Clinton Foundation donors, many of whom had business before the State Department while Clinton served as secretary of state, reached a fever pitch with the publication in May of Clinton Cash by Peter Schweizer. The highly-anticipated book explored connections between State Department actions and large donations to the Clinton Foundation, revealing a pattern of seemingly favorable treatment for some of the charity’s largest donors.
Amid the scrutiny, other reporters uncovered evidence that the Clinton Foundation had not disclosed all of its foreign donations during Clinton’s diplomatic tenure, as it had been required to do under an agreement with the White House.
Clinton has repeatedly denied her family’s charity ever engaged in improper behavior.
Hastert’s hush money
Former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert was indicted in May for his alleged attempts to conceal a trail of money he paid to cover up a separate, more sinister scandal from decades earlier.
Law enforcement officials said Hastert paid more than $3 million to a student he molested when he was a teacher in Illinois.
Although authorities said they did not have enough evidence to bring charges in the molestation case, they did have indications that the former Republican lawmaker withdrew a large sum of cash in small increments in an attempt to flout banking laws that flag major withdrawals for review.
The scandal has effectively destroyed the reputation of the longest-serving Republican House speaker in history.
Disgraced watchdog
Todd Zinser, former inspector general for the Department of Commerce, resigned in June after lawmakers began pushing President Obama to remove the watchdog.
Zinser was accused of retaliating against whistleblowers in his office, hiring and then promoting his girlfriend, spying on the emails of employees he regarded as enemies and hiding official records from investigators.
Zinser even spent $250,000 of taxpayer money on a private attorney to protect himself from the legal firestorm.
Another private email dust-up
Three months after Rafael Moure-Eraso stepped down from his position as head of the Chemical Safety Board in March, lawmakers called for a criminal investigation into his conduct as head of the agency.
Moure-Eraso was accused of using a personal email account to hide official communications, then lying about it to a congressional committee.
The embattled official was also accused of secretly spying on the emails of two of his employees, as well as attempting to hide records from inspector general investigators.
Obamacare loses billions
Federal officials lost track of $2.8 billion in insurance subsidies issued through Obamacare from January to April 2014 alone, the Department of Health and Human Services inspector general found in June.
The watchdog discovered HHS had not set up a system to prevent major payment errors, nor had it established a way to keep track of mistakes.
The findings this summer added to a tough year for Obamacare and its exchanges, many of which suffered from high-profile failures as co-ops around the country shut their doors.
VA mess
The Department of Veterans Affairs weathered a number of controversies this years, from refusing to fire a pair of officials who had stolen $400,000 from the agency to blocking thousands of combat veterans from receiving their promised benefits.
On Veterans Day, the VA fended off criticism about its decision to award millions of dollars in employee bonuses the same year it was caught covering up long delays in care with fake patient waiting lists at facilities across the country.
In July, a whistleblower made public documents that showed one in three veterans had died while waiting to be enrolled in the VA’s benefits program. The backlog of applicants had reached nearly 850,000 by this summer, even as administration officials vowed to cut the long list down.
Planned Parenthood videos
A series of undercover videos recorded by the Center for Medical Progress shed light on a little-known Planned Parenthood policy of providing fetal tissue from abortions to researchers.
The videos, which were released sequentially starting in July, showed Planned Parenthood employees casually discussing the harvest and sale of fetal organs.
Republicans in Congress quickly seized on the issue, ordering investigations and demanding the federal government pull its funding of the massive abortion provider. Critics argued the footage showed illegal activity because the sale of fetal tissue for profit is against the law, while Planned Parenthood supporters contended the prices negotiated on camera covered the health care group’s overhead costs only.
Pennsylvania’s scandal-plagued attorney general
Kathleen Kane, the attorney general of Pennsylvania, hit a new low in the months-long controversy surrounding her conduct in office when the state supreme court suspended her law license in September.
The month before, she was was charged with perjury and leaking information from a 2009 grand jury investigation in what critics called an effort to hurt her adversaries.
The slow-brewing scandal began early last year after the Philadelphia Enquirer published a story indicating Kane had shut down an investigation that had successfully caught several Democratic politicians accepting kickbacks on tape. That investigation was led by Republican-appointed prosecutor Frank Fina, who reportedly disagreed with the decision to stop the probe.
Kane allegedly leaked sealed information about a 2009 case on which Fina had worked, suggesting Fina had ignored leads and failed to take action in an investigation of a civil rights leader.
By November of last year, Kane had hired Lanny Davis, a former attorney for Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial, to defend her against a grand jury investigation into whether she had improperly leaked the information about the 2009 case in order to get back at Fina. She testified that she had broken no laws, although prosecutors argued she had illegally leaked the information and then lied about it because she suspected Fina was behind the original story about her decision to shut down the political probe of Democrats.
Despite losing her law license and facing multiple criminal charges, including obstruction, Kane has repeatedly dismissed calls for her resignation and remains in position as Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general.
Secret Service shenanigans
The Secret Service has been under near-constant fire since September of last year, when an intruder hopped the White House fence and scrambled across the front lawn undetected in a high-profile security lapse.
A report made public earlier this month by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee found the agency had allowed a series of breaches over the past several years and that Secret Service agents had solicited prostitutes on official travel, among other acts of debauchery.
But the probe got personal for Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Oversight Committee chairman, when dozens of Secret Service officials conspired to leak potentially embarrassing information about the Utah Republican as his committee’s investigators closed in.
A watchdog report released in September found Secret Service agents had planted a story about Chaffetz’s unsuccessful 2003 application to become an agent himself.
Following the publication of the Oversight Committee’s scathing review of the agency on Dec. 3, Chaffetz called the Secret Service an “agency in crisis.”
VW cheats
Environmental Protection Agency officials discovered Volkswagen had been cheating on emissions tests by programming engines in some of its cars to manipulate readouts during mandatory emissions tests.
The EPA’s announcement in September touched off a barrage of criticism from public figures both in Germany, where Volkswagen is based, and in the U.S.
Rahm’s cover-up
Rahm Emanuel, embattled mayor of Chicago, presently faces a growing chorus of calls for his resignation amid allegations that his city government concealed a controversial videotape during his re-election campaign.
The dashboard-camera footage in question appears to show a police officer shooting an unarmed black teenager repeatedly. Laquan McDonald, the 17-year-old in the video, was killed in the Oct. 2014 incident, but the officer who pulled the trigger was not charged with any wrongdoing until November of this year.
In the 13 months between the shooting and the state attorney’s decision to bring charges against Officer Jason Van Dyke, the city of Chicago entered into a $5 million settlement with McDonald’s family and reportedly fought off 15 separate Freedom of Information Act requests for the video.
It was not until November 24, when a FOIA lawsuit filed by a freelance reporter finally pried the footage loose, that the Cook County state attorney decided to charge Van Dyke with first-degree murder.
Observers wonder why the city waited to charge the officer until the same day as the release of the video, which sparked widespread protests, and why officials waged such a protracted war to keep the clip under wraps.
Emanuel’s critics suggest the perceived delay in justice was due to his tough re-election fight earlier this year. Six months after McDonald was killed, Emanuel won a mayoral run-off that was seen as historically contentious.
While some of the former White House chief of staff’s allies have stuck by him through the controversy, others, such as the Reverend Al Sharpton, have called for his resignation.
Emanuel is presently weathering the winter scandal in Cuba, where he is on vacation.
