With nearly 250 years of American history accounted for, it’s perhaps no surprise that the nation’s political life has had its good and bad moments. Political scandals have dogged Washington from the beginning, and continue to this day — a fact of which the nation was reminded on Thursday by the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s redacted report on the Russia scandal. It’s too soon to conclude where the Mueller report and surrounding saga will fit in the history of American political scandal, but other moments have firmly solidified their places in that past. TIME asked seven historians to name the worst political scandal in American history.