General

More on the Cadman tape: Seriously not the Nixon tapes, guys.

Rescued from the liveblog, and added here for the attention- and/or blogreadingtime-challenged:

After the press conference, I brought this [the chain of custody of the evidence, i.e. the tape sent to the forensic experts] up with Ryan Sparrow, and he assured me that the tape went straight from the publishers to the party’s lawyers, who sent it to the experts. It’s still not clear, however, how many people would have had the opportunity – or for that matter, the motive – to “doctor” the tapes. I guess the Liberals are off the hook, though, since they never had access to the tape sent to to experts.

While I’m posting, I also want to reiterate my instaprediction that this will turn out to have been a big mistake for the Conservatives.

Not only did it bring the Cadman story back from the dead (or at least a persistent vegetative state), but they oversold the evidence, and still won’t answer the only question that actually matters, as far as any alleged “doctoring” of the tape: What, exactly, was changed/added/taken away that would alter the meaning of what the Prime Minister said?

Also, it’s probably a bad idea to try to convince a roomful of journalists, nearly all of whom have a recording device of some sort in hand, that a pause in the audio is a smoking gun, since we’ve all had the experience of, you know, taping an interview, and we know that sometimes, you turn your recorder off, then back on.

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