Rochester Today – Watergate and Emailgate Comparisons

It is often said that the cover-up was worse than the crime when discussing the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon, which led to some comparisons to Hillary Rodham Clinton's so-called "Emailgate" troubles during Tuesday's Rochester Today Show with Tom Ostrom and Andy Brownell on KROC-AM.

After it was discovered that Nixon had secretly recorded his conversations in the White House, Watergate investigators were successful in convincing the U.S. Supreme Court that those recordings were the property of the state and compelled the embattled president to surrender the damning evidence. Can that same argument the used by investigators seeking access to emails produced by Hillary Rodham Clinton while she served as Secretary of State?

It's interesting to note, that minus the famous 18 1/2 minute gap in the Nixon tapes, President Nixon did comply with the court's decision and handed over the recordings. The cause of the notorious gap in the Nixon tapes has never been fully explained and there remains a great deal of speculation about how it occurred and whether it was an intentional erasure, but it's also clear that hours and hours of politically damaging and embarrassing material were delivered to prosecutors and eventually led to Nixon's resignation.

It appears that level of disclosure will be impossible for Clinton, seeing as the private email server that was used for both her personal and professional communications has been wiped clean since her staff selected and copied what they deemed to be pertinent materials for public review. That means there will always be questions and speculation, beyond the scale of the 18 1/2 minute gap on the Nixon tapes, about what might have been gleaned by an independent inspection of all of the electronic communications that had been stored in Clinton's computer.

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