Evan Vucci/AP
- A Watergate prosecutor says Trump's alleged crimes could be "incalculably worse" than Richard Nixon's.
- Jill Wine-Banks compared the 457-minute gap in Trump's phone logs on the day of the Capitol riot to an 18.5-minute gap in Nixon's records.
- "A lot can be said in 457 minutes," wrote Wine-Banks in an op-ed published on NBC News.
A prosecutor during the Watergate scandal believes that former President Donald Trump's alleged crimes, which may have been obscured by missing White House phone logs, could be "incalculably worse" than former President Richard Nixon's offenses.
"It is often said that Nixon's cover-up was worse than his underlying crime. The reverse is potentially true for Trump," wrote Jill Wine-Banks in an an op-ed published on April 2 by NBC.
"Trump's records gap is 25 times as long as Nixon's, but his alleged crime could be incalculably worse," she added.
Trump is currently under scrutiny over a gap of seven hours and 37 minutes in the White House's call logs on the day of the Capitol riot. The absence of these call records has also prompted the House January 6 committee to investigate a "possible cover-up."
"A lot can be said in 457 minutes," wrote Wine-Banks. "Comparisons to the 18.5-minute gap in a crucial President Richard Nixon recording were immediately obvious to me," she added.
Wine-Banks, who cross-examined Nixon's secretary in 1973 about the gap, also observed she was "not the only to make that connection" between Trump and Nixon.
"First, Nixon's gap seems — based on my experience and other experts — to have been a deliberate erasure. Is Trump's? We don't have enough evidence to say for sure yet, but the missing chunk certainly appears deliberate," she wrote.
According to Wine-Banks, the omission of vital data in the Trump case was "suspicious" and prompted a "series of urgent follow-up questions."
"It is unlikely, even incredible, that no one called in to the president for 457 minutes during a crisis when he was in the White House. Even calls that go unanswered in the White House should be listed on official logs," she wrote.
Wine-Banks added that while the gap in Nixon's conversation was "about covering up a third-rate burglary," Trump's calls were likely about the insurrection and plans to overturn free and fair elections in the US.
Watergate was a major political scandal that centered on the Nixon administration's efforts to cover-up its involvement in a 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters in Washington, DC. The scandal led to Nixon's resignation in August 1974.
Parallels have also been drawn between Watergate and the numerous scandals that plagued the White House during Trump's presidency.
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