The Hall of Presidential Scandal: A CARVER Matrix from FDR to Trump
- Patrick Duggan
- Feb 22
- 14 min read
# The Hall of Presidential Scandal: A CARVER Matrix from FDR to Trump
*16 presidents. 6 dimensions. Body counts. The same methodology we used on Epstein's network — now aimed at the Commander-in-Chief.*
The Methodology
We built a CARVER matrix for the Epstein network — 31 targets scored across six military-grade targeting dimensions, sourced from 329,000+ DOJ documents. That tool worked. Journalists used it. Researchers cited it. The scores held up because they were grounded in evidence, not opinion.
So we asked: what happens when you aim the same lens at the presidency?
CARVER stands for Criticality, Accessibility, Recuperability, Vulnerability, Effect, and Recognizability. The US Army Special Operations Command developed this framework for target analysis — identifying which nodes in a system matter most and why. We adapted it for scandal exposure. Each dimension scores 1-5, maximum 30.
For the Epstein matrix, "Criticality" measured network centrality. For presidents, it measures how deeply a scandal threatened American institutions and constitutional order. "Accessibility" was evidence volume — how many documents? For presidents, it's how much has been declassified, investigated, and publicly verified. "Recuperability" asks whether the institution survived — Nixon's 5 means it never recovered from Watergate; Ford's 4 means the pardon was absorbed but the wound remains. "Vulnerability" tracks provable lies — statements under oath contradicted by tapes, memos, declassified cables, the president's own recordings. "Effect" is body count, institutional damage, precedents set, systems corrupted. "Recognizability" is public awareness — does the average American know this scandal happened?
The dimensions flex but the math doesn't lie.
We scored every president from FDR to Trump's second term. Sixteen entries. Five eras spanning ninety years of American power. One thesis.
Here's the thesis: **FDR's Yalta decision created the Cold War. Every scandal below inherits it.**
The source priority is deliberate: government documents first. National Archives. Congressional Records. Declassified CIA, NSA, and FBI documents. Presidential Libraries. Senate and House Committee reports. The GAO. The 9/11 Commission. The January 6 Committee. The Church Committee. The Pentagon Papers. Court records and FOIA releases. Where independent journalism supplements the record — Woodward, Hersh, Shilts, Julie K. Brown — we note it. And Oliver Stone's *Untold History of the United States*, both the 2012 Showtime series and the companion book, serves as editorial companion throughout. Stone's work is controversial precisely because it takes government documents at face value and follows them to conclusions the government would rather you not reach.
FDR: The Good Man at Yalta
**Score: 21/30**
Franklin Delano Roosevelt scores 21 out of 30 — not because he was corrupt, but because the *effects* of his decisions were catastrophic. The CARVER matrix measures exposure and consequence, not moral character.
In February 1945, Roosevelt traveled to Crimea for the Yalta Conference. He was dying. Cerebral hemorrhage would kill him two months later. Churchill was exhausted. Stalin was calculating. The three men drew lines on maps that would determine the fate of hundreds of millions of people for the next forty-five years.
Roosevelt conceded Eastern Europe to the Soviet sphere. Oliver Stone's *Untold History of the United States* argues this wasn't inevitable — that FDR's vice-presidential choice of Harry Truman over Henry Wallace was the real turning point, the moment the cooperative post-war vision died. Stone makes a compelling case. Wallace would have pursued partnership with Russia. Truman chose empire.
But FDR also signed Executive Order 9066, imprisoning 120,000 Japanese-Americans without trial, without evidence of espionage, without due process. The Commission on Wartime Relocation concluded in 1983 that the internment was motivated by "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership." Reagan signed the formal apology in 1988, forty-three years late.
Here's what the score breakdown looks like: Criticality 4 (Yalta reshaped the world order but didn't threaten American constitutional structure), Accessibility 4 (Yalta records are at the National Archives, FDR Presidential Library at Hyde Park has the correspondence, but some records remain restricted), Recuperability 3 (FDR died in office — he never faced political consequences, and his historical reputation remains top-three among all presidents), Vulnerability 3 (these were failures of judgment, not deliberate malice — the Commission on Wartime Relocation found no evidence of Japanese-American espionage), Effect 5 (the cascade is everything — Cold War, nuclear arms race, 45 years of proxy wars, millions dead), Recognizability 2 (Americans love FDR and don't connect him to the Cold War's origins).
FDR's 21 is the origin score. The cascade starts here. A good man made tragic decisions, and we've been living in their consequences ever since.
The Atomic Empire: Truman and Eisenhower
**Truman: 23/30 | Eisenhower: 22/30**
Harry Truman dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — the only leader in history to authorize nuclear weapons against civilian populations. The Strategic Bombing Survey, commissioned by Truman's own government, concluded that "Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped." Stone's *Untold History* spends two episodes on this, arguing that the bombs were dropped not to end the war with Japan but to intimidate the Soviet Union. The evidence is persuasive.
Truman also created the CIA with the National Security Act of 1947 — the single most consequential piece of legislation in American foreign policy history. Every covert operation, every regime change, every extraordinary rendition traces its legal authority to Truman's signature. He launched the Korean War without Congressional authorization (2-3 million dead, including 36,574 Americans), and instituted loyalty oaths through Executive Order 9835 that became the foundation for McCarthyism. Three million federal employees were investigated. Thousands lost their jobs for political beliefs, not security threats. He left office with a 22% approval rating — the lowest in polling history at the time. Historians have been rehabilitating him ever since, but the institutions he created have killed more people than any other set of American policy decisions in the 20th century.
Eisenhower inherited Truman's architecture and weaponized it. The CIA coups in Iran (Operation AJAX, 1953) and Guatemala (Operation PBSUCCESS, 1954) established the template for American regime change that persists today. The Iran coup directly created the conditions for the 1979 revolution, the hostage crisis, and the ongoing US-Iran conflict. The Guatemala coup led to a 36-year civil war and 200,000 dead, per the UN Truth Commission.
The irony of Eisenhower is his farewell address. "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." He warned America about the machine he spent eight years building. That machine now consumes $886 billion per year.
Stone's *Untold History* treats Truman and Eisenhower as the architects of the national security state that every subsequent president inherited and expanded. The atomic bombs, the CIA, the permanent military posture, the loyalty oaths, the covert coups — all of it traces to these two men. They scored 23 and 22 respectively, but their combined *effect* on American institutions is incalculable. Every president after them operated within the system they built. The question was never whether to maintain the empire. It was how far to extend it and how many lies to tell along the way.
The Rupture: JFK, LBJ, and Nixon
**JFK: 21/30 | LBJ: 28/30 | Nixon: 30/30**
John F. Kennedy created vulnerability. The Bay of Pigs invasion was a catastrophe that exposed American regime-change operations to the world. The Cuban Missile Crisis brought humanity closer to nuclear extinction than any event before or since. And his assassination — still partially classified sixty years later — created a conspiracy ecosystem that has never resolved.
Kennedy scores 21 — the same as FDR. His presidency was too short for the full damage to accumulate, but the things he started metastasized under his successors. The Vietnam advisory commitment grew from 900 "advisors" when he took office to 16,000 by the time he died — a seventeen-fold escalation that Johnson inherited and exploded. The CIA's assassination programs (revealed a decade later by the Church Committee) targeted Fidel Castro, Patrice Lumumba, and others with exploding cigars, poisoned wetsuits, and Mafia hitmen. The institutional dishonesty about his health — Addison's disease, chronic pain, pharmaceutical dependence — was concealed from the public and from Congress. And the assassination itself, still partially classified after six decades despite the JFK Records Act of 1992, created a conspiracy ecosystem that corrodes institutional trust to this day. The Warren Commission said lone gunman. The House Select Committee on Assassinations said probable conspiracy. Neither has been definitively resolved. All of these became the foundation for what followed.
Lyndon Johnson fabricated a war.
The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, passed on August 7, 1964, authorized unlimited military force in Southeast Asia based on an attack that the NSA's own declassified documents (released in 2005) prove never happened. The August 4 incident was a phantom. LBJ knew. McNamara knew. Congress was deliberately misled. The Pentagon Papers, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg and declassified in full in 2011, confirmed the systematic deception.
The result: 58,220 Americans dead. The names are on the wall in Washington. Two to three million Vietnamese dead. Agent Orange continues to cause birth defects in Vietnam today. LBJ scores 28/30 — tied with Bush Jr. and Trump T1. He didn't seek reelection because he couldn't.
Then came Nixon.
Richard Nixon is the ceiling. 30 out of 30. Perfect scandal.
Watergate is the framework against which every subsequent political scandal is measured — the "-gate" suffix has been applied to everything from Monicagate to Deflategate. But Watergate was only the scandal that caught him. The secret bombing of Cambodia — which Nixon publicly denied while ordering it — killed an estimated 1.5 to 2 million people and destabilized the country into the Khmer Rouge genocide. His Enemies List targeted political opponents through the IRS and FBI. The Saturday Night Massacre demonstrated that a president could and would fire anyone who got in his way.
Nixon's own tapes convicted him. Three thousand seven hundred hours of recordings at the National Archives. "I am not a crook" — contradicted by his own voice on his own recording system. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in US v. Nixon that the president is not above the law. Nixon resigned rather than face certain impeachment.
He scored 5 out of 5 in every single dimension. That's what the ceiling looks like.
The Pardon Era: Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Sr.
**Ford: 19/30 | Carter: 17/30 | Reagan: 25/30 | Bush Sr.: 21/30**
Gerald Ford set the most consequential precedent in presidential scandal history: he pardoned Nixon. On September 8, 1974, Proclamation 4311 granted Richard Nixon "a full, free, and absolute pardon" for any crimes he "committed or may have committed" as president.
Ford testified before Congress — the first sitting president to do so — that there was no deal. The pardon cost him the 1976 election. But the precedent it established has echoed through every subsequent scandal: presidents don't face consequences. Iran-Contra pardons. Trump pardons. The line traces back to Ford.
Jimmy Carter is the anomaly. He scores 17/30 — the lowest on the list. His scandals were failures of execution (the Iran Hostage Crisis, Operation Eagle Claw's desert disaster) rather than failures of character. He committed no crimes. He covered up nothing. His "Malaise Speech" told Americans the truth about energy dependence, and they voted him out for it. His post-presidency — Habitat for Humanity, the Camp David Accords legacy, the Nobel Peace Prize — may be the greatest post-presidential career in history. Carter's low score is a badge of honor.
Ronald Reagan scores 25/30. Iran-Contra was a constitutional crime: selling weapons to Iran (a state sponsor of terrorism), funneling the profits to Nicaraguan death squads (in explicit violation of the Boland Amendment), and destroying evidence (Oliver North's shredding sessions are documented in his own testimony). The Kerry Committee documented CIA involvement in drug trafficking. The Tower Commission found Reagan authorized the operation. Reagan said "I don't recall" 88 times.
But the body count is what pushes Reagan's score. He armed the Mujahideen through Operation Cyclone — $3 billion in CIA funding that created the fighters who became the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. Stone's *Untold History* traces the direct line from Stinger missiles in Afghanistan to September 11, 2001. Meanwhile, 89,343 Americans died of AIDS by 1991 while Reagan didn't publicly say the word "AIDS" until 1985. The CDC was begging for funding. Reagan's silence was policy.
George H.W. Bush completes the era at 21/30. His Christmas Eve 1992 pardons of the Iran-Contra conspirators — including Caspar Weinberger, whose trial was 14 days away and whose notes reportedly implicated Bush himself — killed the Walsh investigation. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh wrote that Bush "made a mockery of the rule of law." It was the most consequential use of the pardon power since Ford, and it served the same function: protecting the presidency from accountability by protecting the president's co-conspirators from testimony.
Bush's Gulf War established permanent US military bases in Saudi Arabia, which Osama bin Laden explicitly cited as his primary grievance in his 1996 fatwa declaring war on America. The Highway of Death — US forces bombing retreating Iraqi soldiers for 60 miles on Highway 80 — produced images that briefly forced Americans to confront what their military does in their name. Bush encouraged Iraqi Kurds and Shia to rise up against Saddam, then watched as Saddam slaughtered them when American support didn't materialize. The former CIA Director who became president — the first and only intelligence chief to hold the office — and then pardoned the men who might have testified about what he knew. That's a 21/30.
The System Absorbs: Clinton and Bush Jr.
**Clinton: 24/30 | Bush Jr.: 28/30**
Bill Clinton proved that a president can survive anything if the economy is good and the opposition overplays its hand. He committed perjury under oath in a federal proceeding — "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" is the most famous lie in presidential history, proven false by the Starr Report's 445 pages of evidence. He was impeached. The Senate acquitted him. He left office with 65% approval.
But Clinton's legacy is darker than the Lewinsky scandal suggests. He flew on Jeffrey Epstein's plane at least 26 times — documented in flight logs now in the DOJ EFTA archive (137 documents and counting). He signed PDD-25, the Presidential Decision Directive that specifically prevented US intervention during the Rwandan genocide. Eight hundred thousand people died in 100 days while the Clinton administration debated whether to call it "genocide" — because using that word would have triggered a legal obligation to act. The CIA's daily briefings showed they knew exactly what was happening.
Clinton scores 24/30. The Commodities Futures Modernization Act he signed in 2000 also deregulated derivatives markets and directly enabled the 2008 financial crisis. But those are footnotes compared to Rwanda.
George W. Bush scores 28/30 — tied with LBJ and Trump T1.
The Iraq War was launched on fabricated intelligence. The Senate Intelligence Committee's Phase II Report (2008) documented in exhaustive detail how the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify the invasion. Colin Powell's UN presentation — every single claim proven false. "Mission Accomplished." "We do not torture" — contradicted by the Office of Legal Counsel memos authorizing waterboarding, stress positions, and sleep deprivation. Abu Ghraib. Guantanamo, still open twenty-four years later.
The body count: 4,431 Americans dead (Department of Defense). 500,000 to one million Iraqis dead (Lancet, PLOS Medicine). ISIS emerged directly from the power vacuum the invasion created. The Congressional Budget Office estimates $2.4 trillion in direct costs. The PATRIOT Act is still law.
Bush left office with 22% approval — matching Truman's record low. But here's the recuperability score: he's been rehabilitated. He paints. He gives candy to Michelle Obama at funerals. His favorability is now above 50%. The system absorbed it. That's a recuperability score of 3 — the institution survived even if the bodies didn't.
The Modern Condition: Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump Again
**Obama: 21/30 | Trump T1: 28/30 | Biden: 19/30 | Trump T2: 27/30**
Barack Obama expanded the drone strike program to include the extrajudicial killing of American citizens. Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a CIA drone strike in Yemen on September 30, 2011 — no trial, no due process, no judicial review. His 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, was killed in a separate strike two weeks later. The DOJ's leaked "white paper" argued this was legal. Obama claimed to run "the most transparent administration in history" while prosecuting more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined.
The Libya intervention — undertaken without Congressional authorization under the War Powers Resolution — created a failed state where slave markets now operate in what was once Africa's wealthiest per-capita nation. The NSA mass surveillance revealed by Edward Snowden showed the government was collecting the phone records of every American, tapping Angela Merkel's cell phone, and operating PRISM — a program that accessed the servers of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. Obama scores 21/30 — the same as FDR and JFK. His personal popularity, his historic significance as the first Black president, and his undeniable eloquence obscure the institutional damage. But the drone precedent, the surveillance architecture, and the Libya disaster are his legacy in the CARVER matrix. Good speeches don't reduce body counts.
Donald Trump's first term scores 28/30. Two impeachments. January 6 — the first attack on the Capitol since the British burned it in 1814. The Georgia phone call: "I just want to find 11,780 votes." 400,000+ COVID deaths while the president said "it will disappear." 30,573 documented false or misleading statements tracked by the Washington Post. 91 felony indictments across four jurisdictions. And then he won reelection anyway.
Joe Biden scores 19/30. The Afghanistan withdrawal killed 13 US service members at Abbey Gate and stranded an estimated 13,000+ Afghan allies. He promised not to pardon Hunter Biden, then pardoned Hunter Biden. The Special Counsel's report described him as "an elderly man with a poor memory." He withdrew from the 2024 race after a debate performance that confirmed what the report said. Biden's scandals are sad rather than criminal — more tragedy of age than malice of intent.
Donald Trump's second term, still ongoing, already scores 27/30. The DOJ is restricting access to Epstein files that the Epstein Files Transparency Act mandated be released — a law Congress passed and the president signed. We know this because we indexed 329,000+ documents before the restrictions tightened. DOGE is accessing sensitive federal databases — Treasury payment systems, personnel records, Social Security data — without statutory authorization and without the security clearances normally required. Cabinet members with documented Epstein connections sit in positions of enormous power: Howard Lutnick at Commerce, Steve Bannon as advisor. Twenty-four percent of the original cabinet appears in Epstein file search results. January 6 defendants were pardoned en masse. Federal agencies are being gutted. The score is 27 and climbing — this is a presidency whose final CARVER total cannot yet be calculated because the damage is still accumulating in real time.
The Thesis
Nixon is the ceiling at 30. But three presidents scored 28 — LBJ, Bush Jr., and Trump T1. Trump T2 is at 27 and climbing. FDR's 21 created the world. Everyone after him just lived in it.
The pattern is escalation. Not of scandal — scandal is constant — but of consequence. FDR's Yalta concessions and Japanese internment affected millions but came from genuine (if tragic) wartime calculus. By the time you reach the modern era, you have presidents who lie to start wars, bomb countries in secret, arm future enemies, ignore pandemics, and then get rehabilitated through painting or winning another election.
Look at the numbers in sequence. FDR: 21. Truman: 23. Eisenhower: 22. A slight dip — Eisenhower's warning was real. Then the rupture: JFK at 21, LBJ exploding to 28, Nixon hitting the ceiling at 30. The system nearly broke. Ford's pardon absorbed the shock, and the next four presidents — Ford (19), Carter (17), Reagan (25), Bush Sr. (21) — form a plateau. The system learned to metabolize scandal. Clinton at 24 proved survival was possible. Bush Jr. at 28 proved even war lies could be absorbed. Obama at 21 proved that progressive presidents carry scandal too. And then Trump — 28 in term one, 27 and climbing in term two — proved that the ceiling isn't structural. It's just where Nixon happened to land.
The pardon era that Ford started is the throughline. If presidents faced consequences — real consequences, criminal consequences — the escalation pattern breaks. But they don't. They never have. And so the system learns that there is no ceiling. Nixon scored 30 and was pardoned. Reagan scored 25 and his conspirators were pardoned. Bush Jr. scored 28 and was rehabilitated. Trump T1 scored 28 and was reelected. The feedback loop is complete: scandal without consequence is just spectacle.
Carter is the control group. He scores 17 — the lowest on the list — because he was honest and lost. The one president who didn't lie, didn't cover up, didn't arm death squads, didn't bomb in secret — and the American public fired him for it. Honesty is punished. Lying is absorbed. That's the real scandal, and it doesn't fit in a CARVER matrix.
The combined body count across all sixteen presidencies exceeds seven million documented deaths. That's not an estimate. That's from DoD records, CDC figures, UN reports, Congressional investigations, and independent journalism. Seven million people dead across eighty years of American power, and not a single president has ever served time for any of it. The matrix measures what happened. What you do with that information is up to you.
The Tool
The interactive CARVER matrix is live at [epstein.dugganusa.com/presidential-scandals.html](https://epstein.dugganusa.com/presidential-scandals.html).
Click any president to expand their scoring justifications — every note cites government sources: National Archives, Congressional Records, declassified documents, Presidential Libraries, Senate and House committee reports, GAO, and independent investigations. Oliver Stone's *Untold History of the United States* serves as editorial companion, particularly for the FDR-through-Nixon arc.
**For journalists**: The scandal-to-body-count ratio reveals which presidents got away with the most relative to the damage they caused. Sort by "Deaths" and then by "Recognizability" — the gap between those two columns is the story.
**For researchers**: Every CARVER note cites verifiable sources. The JSON data file is available for download and analysis. Cross-reference with our Epstein CARVER matrix for presidents who appear in both.
**For citizens**: FDR scores 21. Carter scores 17. The honest men are at the bottom. That should tell you everything about the system they operated in.
*Sources: National Archives, Congressional Records, declassified CIA/NSA/FBI documents, Presidential Libraries, Senate and House Committee Reports, GAO, CDC, DOD, 9/11 Commission Report, Jan 6 Committee Report, Church Committee, Pentagon Papers, Tower Commission, Walsh Independent Counsel Report, Starr Report, Strategic Bombing Survey, Commission on Wartime Relocation, Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (Gallery Books, 2012).*
*DugganUSA LLC — Minneapolis, MN — 2026*
*"The 5% is yours to find."*
*Her name was Renee Nicole Good.*
*His name was Alex Jeffery Pretti.*