When Bill Clinton got into office, in 1993, he failed to pass a stimulus plan, but he still birthed an industry that created thousands of jobs, all centered on investigating Bill and Hillary Clinton. Scarcely a year went by that didn’t introduce a new scandal start-up: Travelgate, Fostergate, Troopergate, Whitewatergate, Filegate, Chinagate, Commercegate, and Pardongate, among others. Check out a few dozen more at this Wikipedia page. Most are forgotten today, and some were barely noticed at the time. Most of them were incomprehensible, which scandals usually are, unless they’re about sex. During the Whitewater investigations, Saturday Night Live offered a helpful “Rockers to Help Explain Whitewater” skit set to a “We Are the World”-style song.

If pursuing the Clintons was a living, it came at a price to the pursuer, and that tended to be squandered years or madness. Investigators persuaded themselves that the crucial piece of evidence was just one more subpoena or interview away, and yet that evidence never came. Congressional committees, independent counsel teams, journalists on the left and right, people involved in the Paula Jones sexual-harassment trial against Bill—all entertained hopes of claiming the presidential scalp. None wanted to let go. When the Monica Lewinsky affair was first revealed, special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s deputy, Hickman Ewing, viewed it as a distracting threat to his hopes of unveiling an indictment of Hillary Clinton for efforts to conceal her work for a savings and loan. “Monica saved Hillary,” Ewing later complained.

But we got through it. Today, the Clintons have new controversies to deal with—Hillary’s e-mail, Benghazi, donations to the Clinton Foundation, and a few other things. But many of us were hopeful that at least the 90s scandals could be relegated to the archives. That was before Donald Trump made it clear that we wouldn’t get off so fast. In December, he brought up Bill’s past skirt chasing, setting off a couple of weeks of debates and retrospectives on changing sexual mores. Just last week, Trump revived the subject of the 1993 suicide of Vince Foster, deputy White House counsel in the Clinton administration, albeit with little success. We also learned that Trump has directed Republican National Committee researchers to look into Whitewater. So maybe Filegate is next, and all the scandals and non-scandals of the 90s are going to be revived. If that’s the case, there are two questions to answer: Which Clinton scandals should we view as genuinely serious? And will Trump draw blood by bringing them up?

We’ll have to answer the first question with a preliminary caveat: no one really knows what to make of all the Clinton scandals. If you’re a Republican partisan, you’re going to see them all as evidence of the crookedness of the Clintons. If you’re a Democratic partisan, you’ll see them all as evidence of Republican craziness. But there were just too many for sane people to delve into with thoroughness. We can say this much: the only case that got Bill Clinton in major legal trouble, the one that led to his impeachment in 1998, concerned his lies over an extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. You could argue that all the rest was, in the end, noise.

“The Clintons rarely, if ever, cross the line into obvious illegality. They instead flirt with it from a zone of insouciant vulgarity.”

At the same time, many of these investigations did get a lot of people in trouble, and they made the Clintons look, at best, shabby. Whitewater led to 14 convictions, including several of people who’d been close to the Clintons. The Clintons proved decidedly slippery throughout all of this. If you asked them for records, you might not get them. (Billing records of the Rose Law Firm, where Hillary Clinton worked in Arkansas, were said to be missing, but copies of the documents showed up two years after they had been subpoenaed.) If you asked them a damning factual question, you probably got one answer and then another, morphing as needed in the face of new evidence. (Hillary claimed not to have been involved in firing seven employees of the White House travel office, only to change her story in a response to a memo alleging that she had been involved.)