Under normal circumstances, Rose Mary Woods never would’ve become a well-known national figure. But the woman who served as Richard Nixon’s secretary for many years became famous anyway for an unfortunate reason.
It was Woods who erased 18.5 minutes from one of the Watergate tapes, though she insisted it was an accident. She even demonstrated for cameras how the mistaken recording gap happened, creating images that become known at the time as the “Rose Mary Stretch.”
Woods came to mind this morning reading a New York Times report on “gaps” in White House phone records.
The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has discovered gaps in official White House telephone logs from the day of the riot, finding few records of calls by President Donald J. Trump from critical hours when investigators know that he was making them.
The reporting has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News.
Jokes about Watergate aside, the Times’ article makes clear that no one has suggested, at least at this point, that the White House records have been manipulated. In fact, it’s very easy to believe there are meager phone records because Trump circumvented the official White House switchboard and relied on cellphones. (The Republican said in 2018 he found it “too inconvenient“ to maintain proper presidential telephone protocols.)
But for the bipartisan House select committee, trying to piece together a timeline of what happened before, during, and after the insurrectionist violence, it’s important to know whom the then-president spoke to, when, and for how long. And the “gaps” in the logs help obscure the facts. Indeed, there are conversations that everyone knows occurred on Jan. 6, including a heated call Trump had with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy during the riot, that are not reflected in the logs investigators received from the National Archives. All of this, of course, also increases the importance of the committee’s subpoenas to telecommunications companies. Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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