President Nixon had his relatively low-tech White House Tapes but 17 years later another Republican administration is trying frantically to hang on to – and erase – over 100 digital back-up tapes that are suspected to include embarrassing revelations that could incriminate everyone from the White House cat right up to the President in the Iran-Contra affair and heaven knows what else the administration would prefer to keep private: historians are demanding that the tapes be preserved for posterity, President Bush is equally anxious to have them destroyed and maintains that they are not covered by the Federal Records Act that makes it an offence to destroy potentially historical documents; what are they? The White House electronic mail tapes.
