"Nannygate" is a popular term for the 1993 revelations that caused two of President Bill Clinton's choices for United States Attorney General to become derailed.

In January 1993, Clinton's nomination of corporate lawyer Zoë Baird for the position came under attack after it became known that she and her husband had broken federal law by employing two people who had immigrated illegally from Peru as a nanny and chauffeur for their young child. They had also failed to pay Social Security taxes for the workers, the so-called "Nanny Tax", until shortly before the disclosures. While the Clinton administration thought the matter was relatively unimportant, the news elicited a firestorm of public opinion, most of it against Baird. Within eight days, her nomination lost political support in the U.S. Congress and was withdrawn.

The following month, Clinton's choice of federal judge Kimba Wood for the job was leaked to the press, but within a day it became known that she too had employed someone who had immigrated illegally to look after her child. Although Wood had done so at a time when such a hiring was legal, and had paid Social Security taxes for the worker, the disclosures were enough to cause the immediate withdrawal of Wood from consideration. The Clinton administration then said that the hiring practices for household help would be examined for all of the more than thousand presidential appointments under consideration, causing the whole process to slow down significantly. Determined to choose a woman for the Attorney General post, Clinton finally selected state prosecutor Janet Reno, who was confirmed and served through all eight years of the administration.

The Nannygate matter caused wealthy Americans to ask each other if they too had a "Zoë Baird problem", as the hiring of illegal aliens and the paying of household help off the books were both commonplace. Two fault lines, gender and class, were exposed in the discussion over Nannygate: in the former, a double standard was seen wherein female appointees faced a greater risk of being questioned and disqualified based upon their childcare arrangements, while in the latter, affluent professional women who could afford live-in childcare arrangements were seen as trying to get away with an illegal act. Nannygate-type controversies have subsequently affected other political appointees both in the U.S. and in other countries.

President-elect Bill Clinton had vowed to assemble an administration that "looked like America", and it was widely assumed that one of the major cabinet posts would go to a woman. In particular, he wanted to nominate one for the position of United States Attorney General, something women's political action groups were also requesting. No woman had previously served in this post. His choice, whose nomination was announced on December 24, 1992, was Zoë Baird, a 40-year-old senior vice president and general counsel at Aetna Life and Casualty Company who had previously worked in the Justice Department during the Carter administration.

Little known before the nomination (Clinton had not met her until their interview), Baird was a skilled networker who had been the protégé of several powerful Washington insiders, including Clinton transition team leader Warren Christopher and once-and-future White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler. Picking Baird gave Clinton the ability to satisfy the women's groups' desires while still showing independence by not choosing one of their preferred selections. Despite the lack of familiarity and getting a lukewarm response from some Clinton backers – those in the legal public interest community said "Zoë who?" and her corporate sympathies discouraged liberals – Baird was expected to gain confirmation in the U.S. Senate. Baird and her husband, Yale Law School professor Paul Gewirtz, had a three-year-old son.

On January 14, 1993, a page-one story in The New York Times broke the news that Baird had hired a married pair of illegal aliens from Peru, Lillian and Victor Cordero, between 1990 and 1992. Lillian had served as the nanny for Baird's son and Victor had served as a part-time driver. Furthermore, Baird had not paid Social Security taxes for the couple, until making a lump-sum payment earlier in January 1993. Baird had brought forward this information willingly to transition officials and authorities performing background checks; she said that she had thought that the fact that they were sponsoring the couple for citizenship made the hiring acceptable, and that they could not pay the taxes for people who were not yet in the country legally. (Baird's immigration lawyer would dispute some aspects of exactly when the sponsorship request took place.)

This was the first time a presidential cabinet nominee had faced such an issue. While the Clinton transition team had found out about the matter during their vetting of Baird, they had underestimated the seriousness of its impact. Their attitude about Baird's infraction was that it was a technical violation and that 'Everybody does it'. Clinton operatives initially thought the Baird revelation was no big deal and would quickly lose the attention of the media and public.