Rose Mary Woods said she might have caused about five minutes of the gap by keeping her foot on the pedal while answering the phone. When she showed how, the stretch required looked impossible to many who saw it. [3] Even the White House lawyers concluded she could not have caused the whole gap. [1]
The court’s experts found something worse than an accident: several separate erasures, made by hand. Someone stopped and started the machine again and again over the same stretch of tape. [2]
Then there is the timing and the content. The erased talk was with Haldeman, three days after the arrests, and prosecutors believed Watergate was discussed. Only a handful of people had the tape. Haig told the court that White House lawyers had discussed whether “some sinister force” had applied a second source of energy. On this reading, the gap is the cover-up’s most direct act of evidence destruction, and the person with the strongest motive was the President. [1]
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