The Nixon White House was plagued with the "18-1/2 Minute Gap" during recordings made by President Nixon as he chatted with his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. News of the erasure, late the following year, eroded Nixon's credibility at a time when his presidency was unraveling over the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.
What about 12 Day Gap in Bush's White House emails? Will it become as well known?
Last week Rep. Henry Waxman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform revealed the extent of the archives allegedly missing from several executive offices: a total of 473 days from 2003 to 2005. Waxman said he made the allegations public after a White House official insisted that "we have actually no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing."
According to one official analysis reported in Time Magazine, there were 12 days without archived e-mail from the President's inner offices during a troubled period, December 2003 to February 2004, when it became clear that the central premise of the war — the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq — had collapsed.
There are also 16 days of missing emails reported from the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney.
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