Tornado Alley (PROG)

[blackhawks]

Too late to destroy a report, bet that it is on a thumb drive or two by now, but I remember how similar attempts at a cover-up played out. History will repeat.

Nixon Ordered Tapes Destroyed


What I mean to say is this. We're talking in the confidence of this room. I don't give a [expletive] what comes out on you or John or even on poor, damn, dumb John Mitchell. There is going to be a total pardon."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/nixon/103097tapes.htm

"Don't — don't even say that," Haldeman warned.

"You know it," Nixon went on, oblivious of the microphones. "You know it and I know it."

"No, don't say that," Haldeman protested again, to no avail.

In the midst of all this turmoil, Nixon expressed a keen sense of being cornered by his enemies. Even if he fired the whole White House staff, he told press secretary Ronald L. Ziegler on April 27, "that isn't going to satisfy these goddamn cannibals! ... Hell, they aren't after Ehrlichman or Haldeman or Dean. They're after me! The president. They hate my guts. That's what they're after."

And THAT is the history that is as current as today's paranoid remarks by trump. But hey, even paranoids have enemies.

Nixon fought ferociously to prevent the tapes from falling into the hands of Watergate prosecutors, even to the point of triggering demands for his impeachment when he fired Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox in the "Saturday Night Massacre" of Oct. 20, 1973. He finally lost the legal battle in the Supreme Court the next summer and, shortly thereafter, his presidency. The tapes had brought him down.

"I had bad advice, bad advice from well-intentioned lawyers who had sort of a cockeyed notion that I would be destroying evidence," Nixon said years later in a videotaped interview. "I should have destroyed them."