Teapot Dome scandal Teapot Dome scandal The Teapot Dome scandal was a bribery scandal involving the administration of United States President Warren G. Harding from 19211923. Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall had leased Navy petroleum reserves at Teapot Dome in Wyoming, and two locations in California, to private oil companies at low rates without competitive bidding. The leases were the subject of a sensational investigation by Senator Thomas J. Walsh. Convicted of accepting bribes from the oil companies, Fall became the first presidential cabinet member to go to prison; no one was convicted of paying the bribes. Before the Watergate scandal,
Teapot Dome scandal Fountains rode home from a meeting at Fall's ranch. Another significant outcome was the Supreme Court's ruling in "McGrain v. Daugherty" (1927) which, for the first time, explicitly established that Congress had the power to compel testimony. The field was then idled for 49 years, but went back into production in 1976. After earning over $569 million in revenue having extracted of oil over the previous 39 years, in February 2015, the Department of Energy sold the oil field for $45 million to Stranded Oil Resources Corp. Although this scandal has been infamously used as a basis of comparison most