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3 to 18; What’s a Few Minutes Among Friends? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-21
What goes wrong in American justice when the authorities can explain it away with a clock? When Sandra Bland died in a Texas prison three days after her arrest, the observation and surveillance protocol of the jail came under scrutiny. The unaccounted-for hours between the arrest of a bright young woman who moved to Texas from Chicago to take a job turned into her alleged suicide after a traffic stop. Of course, Ms. Bland’s death was explained away by saying no one saw her in the time she was last checked in her cell, and when she was found with a plastic trash bag tied around her neck. The suicide of child rapist Jeffrey Epstein was explained as a minute gap in the jail facility's surveillance system that allowed his presumed suicide to take place. What U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi described as a minute gap, when Epstein was not observed, has proven to be nearly three minutes long.
Three minutes may not sound like a long enough time to commit a crime, but sit quietly still for three minutes, and it will seem like an eternity. The most significant contributor to conspiracy theories is the unexplained time gap. Did Lee Harvey Oswald have time to get off three shots, for example? One of the most famous gaps in political history is the missing eighteen and a half minutes in the Nixon tapes. Once it was discovered that a secret taping system existed in the White House, the Watergate investigators sought the recordings. As a result, the name Rose Mary Woods lives in infamy. Ms. Woods was the private secretary to disgraced former President Richard M. Nixon and, more importantly, was tasked with transcribing the White House Oval Office tapes for investigators.
Woods’ explanation of why the tape had a mysterious 18.5-minute gap became the butt of jokes and coined the phrase the Rose Mary Stretch. According to an ABC news report, “Her explanation was that she was listening to the tape and … the telephone rang,” said assistant Watergate special prosecutor, Jill Wine-Banks. “So, she kept her foot on a pedal, pushed the wrong button. She pushed record instead of off and reached for the phone.” Woods claimed, in her testimony, that she may have produced a 4- or 5-minute gap in the tape, but nothing more. A panel set up in the 1970s by federal Judge John Sirica, who presided over the Watergate criminal trials, concluded the erasures were done in at least five separate but connected segments.
It was an odd dichotomy: Richard Nixon finally acquiesced to the law despite having broken it. Once the Supreme Court ruled that he must turn the recordings over, he did so, under duress. As remarkable a document as the Constitution is, it relies on integrity to work. I fear that nothing will come of the Epstein/Trump scandal because the words' integrity' and 'character' are like Trump’s skin and tanning oil; so distinct and obvious, it is painful to watch.
Your Vote is Still Your Voice
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