Two decades later, it was Filegate, which Clinton famously said was nothing more than “a completely honest bureaucratic snafu” when FBI security-clearance files on at least 400 prominent Republicans somehow turned up at the White House. Multiple investigations subsequently failed to show whether Clinton or first lady Hillary Clinton ordered senior aide Craig Livingstone to request the files from the FBI. Even so, Clinton’s dismissal of the scandal as a bureaucratic foul-up is hard to square with the fact Livingstone’s only qualification for the job of director of White House personnel security was his work as an advance man for the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign and other Democratic campaigns.

Unlike the Nixon scandal, there is as yet no evidence that Obama or one of his top aides ordered the IRS to go after the conservative groups, but then it was only on Friday that Lois Lerner, who heads the IRS tax exemption unit, admitted the “inappropriate” actions while answering a question during an American Bar Association conference. Those actions were committed by low-level employees in the Cincinnati IRS office, Lerner claimed. The most interesting immediate question may be what prompted Lerner’s unexpected candor about an issue that has been percolating since last summer when Tea Party groups across the country first reported receiving demands from the tax agency for copies of their donor lists.