The deliberate erasure had not been made to protect the president, but to embarrass him. And of course the gap prompted Nixon to declare he was not a crook and to face up to delivery of the tapes unlike Clinton, who continues to stonewall well after being confronted with evidence that the allegedly lost White House e-mails had been found. Insight is assured Chairman Burton won t let go until a copy of every one of those many thousands of e-mails is sitting on his desk. The White House, meanwhile, has spun a charge that the taxpayers are tired of spending millions of dollars on witch-hunt investigations that go nowhere. Republicans counter that the public is tired of obstruction of justice.
Polls indicate that both are right.
There is concern among Republicans that the Clinton e-mails may not be released until after the president leaves office. Either way, the electronic record of these secret conversations may turn out to be the one piece of evidence that Clinton never can escape. Certainly Nixon learned that. Perhaps that s why he told his former aide, Monica Crowley, in one of the last interviews before his death, that America should not walk away from the Clinton scandals because the evidence is out there somewhere. Clinton and Hillary are guilty of obstruction of justice, maybe more period, Nixon told Crowley.