willing to essentially sort of do a mid-atlantic version of what george wallace was threatening to do in the '68 election to robon of his base in the southern strategy. they picked agnew because they thought he was provocatively and performatively racist enough that it could defend nixon's racist white flank which was going to be george wallace debeg denied the presidency. but the midwest states stayed with nixon, and they really believe a large part of that was because of agnew's appeal to the hard right racist base. >> he continued that in the white house. he was the guy that would be sent out to say the harshest possible things, put it in the harshest possible language. rachel, what crimes did spi spiro agnew commit that federal prosecutors got wind of and start investigating, and how do they do that in a justice department that was -- everything is prior to donald trump -- that was the most corruptly run justice department in our history at that point, run by an attorney general, john mitchell, who himself got convicted of crimes? >> part of the reason they were able to do it is that they got lucky that the