10 Best Political Corruption & Misconduct Books

The knockdown, drag-out, untold story of the other scandal that rocked Nixon’s White House, and reset the rules for crooked presidents to come–with new reporting that expands on Rachel Maddow’s Peabody Award-nominated podcast ” Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz expand on their riveting podcast to create a work both scholarly and disturbing in its parallels to current events.”–Preet Bharara, New York Times bestselling author of Doing Justice and host of the podcast Stay Tuned with Preet Is it possible for a sitting vice president to direct a vast criminal enterprise within the halls of the White House? To have one of the most brazen corruption scandals in American history play out while nobody’s paying attention? And for that scandal to be all but forgotten decades later? The year was 1973, and Spiro T. Agnew, the former governor of Maryland, was Richard Nixon’s second-in-command. Long on firebrand rhetoric and short on political experience, Agnew had carried out a bribery and extortion ring in office for years, when–at the height of Watergate–three young federal prosecutors discovered his crimes and launched a mission to take him down before it was too late, before Nixon’s impending downfall elevated Agnew to the presidency. The self-described “counterpuncher” vice president did everything he could to bury their investigation: dismissing it as a “witch hunt,” riling up his partisan base, making the press the enemy, and, with a crumbling circle of loyalists, scheming to obstruct justice in order to survive. In this blockbuster account, Rachel Maddow and Michael Yarvitz detail the investigation that exposed Agnew’s crimes, the attempts at a cover-up–which involved future president George H. W. Bush–and the backroom bargain that forced Agnew’s resignation but also spared him years in federal prison. Based on the award-winning hit podcast, Bag Man expands and deepens the story of Spiro Agnew’s scandal and its lasting influence on our politics, our media, and our understanding of what it takes to confront a criminal in the White House.

New York Times bestselling author Sharyl Attkisson takes on the media’s misreporting on Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, Joe Biden, Silicon Valley censorship, and more. When the facts don’t fit their Narrative, the media abandons the facts, not the Narrative. Virtually every piece of information you get through the media has been massaged, shaped, curated, and manipulated before it reaches you. Some of it is censored entirely. The news can no longer be counted on to reflect all the facts. Instead of telling us what happened yesterday, they tell us what’s new in the prepackaged soap opera they’ve been calling the news. For the past four years, five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative journalist and New York Times bestselling author Sharyl Attkisson has been collecting and dissecting alarming incidents tracing the shocking devolution of what used to be the most respected news organizations on the planet. For the first time, top news executives and reporters representing every major national television news outlet–from ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN to FOX and MSNBC–speak frankly, confiding in Attkisson about the death of the news as they once knew it. Their concern transcends partisan divides. Most frightening of all, a broad campaign in the media has convinced many Americans not only to accept but to demand censorship over journalism. It is a stroke of genius on the part of those seeking to influence public opinion: undermine public confidence in the news, then insist upon “curating” information and divining the “truth.” The thinking is done for you. They’ll decide which pesky facts shouldn’t cross your desk by declaring them false, irrelevant, debunked, unsafe, or out-of-bounds. We have reached a state of utter absurdity, where journalism schools teach students that their own, personal truth or chosen narratives matter more than reality. In Slanted , Attkisson digs into the language of propagandists, the persistence of false media narratives, the driving forces behind today’s dangerous blend of facts and opinion, the abandonment of journalism ethics, and the new, Orwellian definition of what it means to report the news.

Wall Street Journal and USA Today Bestseller! As seen on The Ben Shapiro Show! Follow the Money exposes the labyrinth of connections between D.C.’s slimiest swamp creatures–Democrat operatives, lying informants, desperate and destructive FBI agents, Obama power brokers, CIA renegade John Brennan, George Soros, and more–who conspired to attack Trump by manufacturing one bogus scandal after another. Bestselling author, podcast favorite, and Fox News contributor Dan Bongino delivers the third and most shocking of his acclaimed series chronicling the Deep State war against Donald Trump. Starting with the Trump impeachment hearings, Bongino works forward and backward to piece together the connections of a vast, well-funded cabal of wealthy Democrats and D.C. swamp elite to the non-stop deluge of manufactured scandals launched specifically to attack, destabilize, and ultimately remove Trump and his administration. Zooming in on Ukraine, Bongino unspools a complex sequence of corruption–from the miraculous “discovery” of a mysterious black ledger that linked financial transactions to Trump campaign insider Paul Manafort and cast a shadow over the entire Trump team, to Joe Biden’s unexamined quid pro quo interference with Kyiv politics as he threatened to withhold a loan unless a prosecutor was removed from office. The former Secret Service agent exposes how Glenn Simpson, the corrupt cheerleader behind the lie-filled Steele dossier, wrangled millions from top Democrat donor George Soros to meddle in Ukraine politics. Bongino also reveals Soros’s desperate multimillion-dollar plan to stop Trump’s re-election. Using FBI documents, Bongino reveals the outrageous actions of Robert Mueller’s investigators, who sat on evidence that proved the supposedly damning Trump Tower meeting between a Russian lawyer and senior campaign officials was nothing more than a twenty-minute waste of time for all involved. Other chapters delve into the disturbing presence of Obama’s fixer, obstruction angel Kathryn “Kathy” Ruemmler, who represents a rogues gallery of Russiagate political operatives; the FBI’s inside source on the National Security Council, Anthony Ferrante, who dedicated himself to the fruitless task of trying to prove the Steele dossier was legitimate; and “Special Agent 1” Stephen M. Somma’s curious obsession with Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, which was stoked by a Flynn-fixated paid operative named Stefan Halper. Flynn is the centerpiece of one of the book’s most revealing chapters, in which Bongino deconstructs the FBI’s elaborate takedown of Trump’s National Security Advisor, revealing how and why the three-star general was set up not once…but three times. Bongino also returns to the last, desperate attempt to derail Trump–the impeachment trial–and uncovers Adam Schiff’s lies and the Ukraine-call whistleblower’s multiple secret ties to never-Trumpers and Schiff himself. In the final chapter, Bongino unveils the newest front to stop Trump: the unleashing of COVID-19 from China and how the disease mutated from a killer plague in Wuhan to a weapon to destroy America’s economy and, with it, Trump’s re-election chances. Follow the Money displays dizzying detective work from a truly relentless, passionate, and patriotic reporter. An astonishing chronicle of the relentless war to destroy Donald Trump and his administration, this expose is a must-read for anyone who wants to unravel the most shocking and corrupt campaign to unseat a sitting president in American history.

A #1 New York Times Bestseller! “I read it cover-to-cover. I did not intend to, but I started at the beginning and didn’t put it down until it was over.”–Rachel Maddow, MSNBC This book almost didn ‘t see the light of day as government officials tried to bar its publication. The Inside Story of the Real President Trump, by His Former Attorney and Personal Advisor –The Man Who Helped Get Him Into the Oval Office Once Donald Trump’s fiercest surrogate, closest confidant, and staunchest defender, Michael Cohen knows where the skeletons are buried. This is the most devastating business and political horror story of the century. As Trump’s lawyer and “fixer,” Cohen not only witnessed firsthand but was also an active participant in the inner workings of Trump’s business empire, political campaign, and presidential administration. This is a story that you have not read in newspapers, or on social media, or watched on television. These are accounts that only someone who worked for Trump around the clock for over a decade–not a few months or even a couple of years–could know. Cohen describes Trump’s racist rants against President Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, and Black and Hispanic people in general, as well as the cruelty, humiliation, and abuse he leveled at family and staff. Whether he’s exposing the fact that Trump engaged in tax fraud by inflating his wealth or electronic fraud by rigging an online survey, or outing Trump’s Neanderthal views towards women or his hush-money payments to clandestine lovers, Cohen pulls no punches. He shows Trump’s relentless willingness to lie, exaggerate, mislead, or manipulate. Trump emerges as a man without a soul–a man who courts evangelicals and then trashes them, panders to the common man, but then rips off small business owners, a con man who will do or say absolutely anything to win, regardless of the cost to his family, his associates, or his country. At the heart of Disloyal , we see how Cohen came under the spell of his charismatic “Boss” and, as a result, lost all sense of his moral compass. The real “real” Donald Trump who permeates these pages–the racist, sexist, homophobic, lying, cheating President–will be discussed, written about, and analyzed for years to come.

Bob Woodward ‘s new book, Rage , is an unprecedented and intimate tour de force of new reporting on the Trump presidency facing a global pandemic, economic disaster and racial unrest. Woodward, the number one international best-selling author of Fear: Trump in the White House , has uncovered the precise moment the president was warned that the Covid-19 epidemic would be the biggest national security threat to his presidency. In dramatic detail, Woodward takes listeners into the Oval Office as Trump’s head pops up when he is told in January 2020 that the pandemic could reach the scale of the 1918 Spanish Flu that killed 675,000 Americans. In 17 on-the-record interviews with Woodward over seven volatile months – an utterly vivid window into Trump’s mind – the president provides a self- portrait that is part denial and part combative interchange mixed with surprising moments of doubt as he glimpses the perils in the presidency and what he calls the “dynamite behind every door.” At key decision points, Rage shows how Trump’s responses to the crises of 2020 were rooted in the instincts, habits and style he developed during his first three years as president. Revisiting the earliest days of the Trump presidency, Rage reveals how Secretary of Defense James Mattis, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats struggled to keep the country safe as the president dismantled any semblance of collegial national security decision making. Rage draws from hundreds of hours of interviews with firsthand witnesses as well as participants’ notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents. Woodward obtained 25 never-seen personal letters exchanged between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, who describes the bond between the two leaders as out of a “fantasy film.” Trump insists to Woodward he will triumph over Covid-19 and the economic calamity. “Don’t worry about it, Bob. Okay?” Trump told the author in July. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get to do another book. You’ll find I was right.” Includes excerpts from Bob Woodward’s interviews with President Donald J. Trump for Rage.

This book almost didn ‘t see the light of day as government officials tried to bar its publication. The inside story of the real President Trump, by his former attorney and personal advisor – the man who helped get him into the oval office Once Donald Trump’s fiercest surrogate, closest confidant, and staunchest defender, Michael Cohen knows where the skeletons are buried. This is the most devastating business and political horror story of the century. As Trump’s lawyer and “fixer”, Cohen not only witnessed firsthand but was also an active participant in the inner workings of Trump’s business empire, political campaign, and presidential administration. This is a story that you have not read in newspapers, or on social media, or watched on television. These are accounts that only someone who worked for Trump around the clock for over a decade – not a few months or even a couple of years – could know. Cohen describes Trump’s racist rants against President Barack Obama, Nelson Mandela, and Black and Hispanic people in general, as well as the cruelty, humiliation, and abuse he leveled at family and staff. Whether he’s exposing the fact that Trump engaged in tax fraud by inflating his wealth or electronic fraud by rigging an online survey, or outing Trump’s Neanderthal views towards women or his hush-money payments to clandestine lovers, Cohen pulls no punches. He shows Trump’s relentless willingness to lie, exaggerate, mislead, or manipulate. Trump emerges as a man without a soul – a man who courts evangelicals and then trashes them, panders to the common man, but then rips off small business owners, a con man who will do or say absolutely anything to win, regardless of the cost to his family, his associates, or his country. At the heart of Disloyal , we see how Cohen came under the spell of his charismatic “Boss” and, as a result, lost all sense of his moral compass. The real “real” Donald Trump who permeates this audiobook – the racist, sexist, homophobic, lying, cheating president – will be discussed, written about, and analyzed for years to come.

From the author of the New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race , a subversive history of white male American identity. What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status over women and people of color, instead of by actual accomplishments? Through the last 150 years of American history — from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics — Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves. Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism. As provocative as it is essential, this book will upend everything you thought you knew about American identity and offers a bold new vision of American greatness.

From the author of the New York Times best seller So You Want to Talk About Race , a subversive history of White male American identity. What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of White men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status over women and people of color instead of by actual accomplishments? Through the last 150 years of American history – from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics – Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of White male supremacy on women, people of color, and White men themselves. Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new White male identity, one free from racism and sexism. As provocative as it is essential, this book will upend everything you thought you knew about American identity and offers a bold new vision of American greatness.