I'm going to put this response onto the Cypherpunks list, so that everybody learns what is going on.
You said, "I don’t think they were intentionally edited by anyone." That may very well be because you haven't checked. Would you know what to look for, if I hadn't told you? Probably not.
I am apparently the first person in about 16 years to have identified this problem. And the reason I discovered it was simply that I was looking for a very specific piece of information that I knew should have been in it: The date of the first appearance of Part 1 of my Assassination Politics essay, which as I had vaguely recalled should have been somewhere in February or March 1995. And parts 2-6 should also have appeared in the 1995 archive.
I didn't place it there: It was copied by a person whose name I don't recall (maybe I never knew it...) from the Digitaliberty email list, run by Bill Frezza. There was a huge amount of discussion of it in mid-1995. You can even find many references in 1996, but essentially nothing in 1995.
I looked for this, and was shocked by what I saw (or more precisely, DIDN'T see): It is quite obvious now what happened: With a tiny number of exceptions in November and December 1995, all messages with the strings "Jim Bell", "jimbell@pacifier.com", " AP ", and "Assassination Politics" simply didn't appear. Someone had intentionally removed them. The fraud had been so minutely done that any appearance of the string ' ap ' that meant "Assassination Politics" had been removed, and the very few that meant "Associated Press" remained. Not an accident. Quite intentional.
I think you owe it to the other users of the Cypherpunks list (then and now) to correct your "I don’t think they were intentionally edited by anyone." to "I agree it's obvious that 1995's archive was forged". And "I will help you to figure out who did it." It only takes your recognition that those strings had to appear, heavily, in the data and nevertheless they did do not. Check for the appearance of those strings in 1996, to see what the "normal" situation should have been. A few minutes of text searching will confirm all this.
You could easily do this by talking to other people who were aware of what happened on the Cypherpunks list in 1995. Declan McCullagh was one; the names of the others are obviously available in the 1995 and 1996 archive itself, including the email addresses (at least, their email addresses then) of those very people. They will all agree that those strings, at the very least, are missing. And you won't find an 'innocent' explanation, no matter how hard you try.
This cannot possibly have been by accident. And you are virtually certain to have been in contact with the person who did that fraud, or at least one who knew what was going on. You probably have archives, possibly on 'retired' hard drives. Or the people who gave the data to you. Eventually, we will find the answer.
With a little searching, I can see that you work in the 'security' field. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Lackey You are, therefore, well-qualified for this task. And you should want to ensure that your reputation is upheld with your handling of this matter.
Jim Bell