"Within the thousand-page document, my grandfather found two transcripts of the same conversation from April 16, 1973, between Nixon and Assistant Attorney General Henry Petersen. However, the two transcripts were so different that no one—not even journalists or Nixon-administration members—had noticed that they represented the same conversation. Nixon had doctored the transcripts, and mistakenly released an unedited version along with the edited one. The doctored version contained far more words that were marked “inaudible,” and other words were changed so as to render sentences meaningless. My grandfather wrote to the Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the story about the transcript discrepancies.Read more: How our readers responded to Watergate
White House spokespeople tried to pass off the differences as mere typist errors, but as my grandfather asked the Associated Press, “How could people listen to the same piece of tape and hear different words?” The House Judiciary Committee demanded that Nixon release the unedited transcripts, and the rest—the Supreme Court case United States v. Nixon, the release of the “smoking gun” tape, impeachment hearings, political chaos, and Nixon’s ultimate resignation—is history. [end of partial quotation]
Has anyone heard from the Cypherpunks who held the data that later made its way to the CP Archives, specifically the 1995 file?
Jim Bell