Long-sealed Watergate documents may be released

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Long-sealed Watergate documents may be released
Updated 42m ago

WASHINGTON (AP) – The U.S. Department of Justice says at least some sealed documents in the 1972 Watergate burglary case should be released.

The department responded Friday to a request by a Texas history professor who is seeking access to materials he believes could help answer lingering questions about the burglary that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation.

Luke Nichter wrote a judge in Washington to ask that potentially hundreds of pages of documents be unsealed. The judge earlier this year ordered the Justice Department respond with any objections.

Department attorney Elizabeth Shapiro said in a court document that the office would not oppose the release of at least some documents.

- end of article -

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/story/2012-06-02/watergate-sealed-documents/55348514/1

[Judi Lynn]

1. More from a longer version of the same article published by Huffington Post:

~snip~
"Forty years after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee that began the chapter of U.S. history known as Watergate, no good reason exists to keep sealed many of the judicial records created during the trial of the Watergate burglars," she wrote.

But Shapiro said three categories of documents should remain secret: certain documents containing personal information, grand jury information and documents about the content of illegally obtained wiretaps.

In particular, Nichter wants access to records of at least two court hearings held behind closed doors and interviews and testimony given by Alfred Baldwin III, a former FBI agent who was hired to listen to and transcribe conversations from a phone the burglars wiretapped at the Democratic National Committee during a burglary on May 28, 1972. The burglars were caught when they returned to the office on June 17, 1972.

There is some precedent for unsealing Watergate documents. In 2011 the same judge, U.S. District Chief Judge Royce Lamberth, ordered that a secret transcript of President Nixon's testimony to a grand jury about the Watergate break-in be made public. Lamberth agreed with historians that arguments for releasing the 297-page transcript outweighed arguments for secrecy, because the investigations are long over and Nixon died in 1994.

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/02/watergate-documents_n_1565137.html

[uberblonde]

2. But not the rest of the Kennedy files?

Hmm.

[MADem]

5. I have to agree--more transparancy, not less!!!

I think the Kennedy files will come out after Castro dies.

[underpants]

3. The more info the better

I am a liberal.

I wonder if Cheney's name pops up

[grasswire]

4. Colson's dead now. Open the files.

Total transparency.