Thinking about Rose Mary Woods
I first learned her name as a young kid after walking precincts with my brother’s wife in support of the reelection campaign of President Nixon. With a brother in the military during the Vietnam War, there was no way I was supporting a “Communist supporting man” like George McGovern.
We were Young Republicans and proud of it.
But then came the hearings. And eventually the White House tapes. Soon the transcripts were delivered to our house, word for word in a special Los Angeles Times Watergate section.
With the famous gap. 18.5 minutes of silence.
There, in front of America was evidence of a coverup. The Nixon Administration it was argued, was guilty of not providing to Congress, as ordered by US Courts, tapes of conversations between the President and his Chief of Staff, H.R. Haldeman.
Congress was interested in those tapes because they were captured by the president's secret White House recording system in the days immediately following the break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters.
But those tapes contained a mysterious 18.5-minute gap -- a patch of buzzes and clicks of missing audio -- in the middle of a recording made June 20, 1972, three days after the break-in.
18.5 minutes.
In the aftermath of the Watergate Scandal, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act. It ultimately made all communications and documents of the Executive Branch, property of the US Government.
This law includes memos, emails, texts, phone logs and more.
It was passed to help us better know what our government was doing and, in the event of a potential crime, to help provide evidence to convict, or exonerate members of the Executive Branch, including the President of the United States.
All of that came about because of 18.5 minutes.
A short length of time that ultimately brought down a presidency and ended the career of Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s longtime political secretary.
Which brings us to today and that Presidential Records Act, passed in 1978.
We can quibble with the law, we can say we hate the law, but, as the Supreme Court has frequently said, the law is the law. If you don’t like it, change it. But until then, follow it.
That law is in the news today because the National Archives, where the Executive Branch sends their records for safekeeping in accordance with the law, was recently ordered to turn over to Congress White House call records from January 6. Which they did.
Except those records from the White House are incomplete. It seems a block of time that we know from other records included calls to and from the White House, is mysteriously missing.
Shades of Rose Mary Woods.
Except this time it is not 18.5 minutes, it’s over 7 hours!
What the Trump White House wants us to believe is that for over 7 hours, no one called the president. And the president called no one. Not a single call came into or went out of the White House while the Capitol was under a sustained attack that injured more than 100 Capitol police officers.
Take a minute and let that sink in.
The White House defense is that they made no calls during that debacle. They are essentially saying while they watched the beating of police officers live on television in the Oval Office, they felt no need to call anyone to help those officers or to try and stop the attack.
While we know from other members of the administration that the above defense is fundamentally untrue, we are still left with an administration that has apparently violated the Presidential Records Act.
This is a choose your poison moment.
Either the Trump Administration chose not to “protect and defend” the US while the Capitol was under direct attack, or they are lying and made a decision to break the law calling for the proper safeguarding of presidential records.
President Nixon might well have survived the Watergate Scandal even after the tapes became known. But that 18.5 minute gap was too much even for his political allies.
I wonder if any leader in the GOP today can summon the courage of Howard Baker and Barry Goldwater back then and say enough is enough. For the sake of our democracy and so that we can still credibly claim are a nation of laws, I hope so.
Because President Trump, his administration and his enablers must be held to account for their actions on January 6 and for flouting the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
What say you?
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people for the leadership in supporting the people of Ukraine in the fight against Russian aggression. This help is needed today more than ever! It saves the lives of our defenders of democracy and freedom and brings us closer to restoring peace in 
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