“Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?”

[5-second pause]

“I was aware of listening devices, yes, sir.”

On July 16, 1973, Fred Thompson, the Senate Watergate Committee’s Republican Counsel, had swiftly dispensed of formalities before teeing up the surprise witness, President Nixon’s Deputy Assistant, Alexander Butterfield. What Butterfield spilled eventually spiraled out of control and into multiple shorthands: bombshell testimony, the smoking gun tape, evidence that brought down a President.

“Secretary Raffensperger, after making a false claim about shredding of ballots, the President suggested that you may be committing a crime by not going along with his claims of election fraud. And after suggesting that you might have criminal exposure, President Trump makes his most explicit ask of the call. Let's play a part of that conversation.”

[Begin videotape]

“So, look, all I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is 1 more than we have. Because we won the state.”

On June 21, 2022 – 49 years after the Watergate Hearings – Congressman and January 6 Committee Member Adam Schiff’s staff cued up the audio from that secretly taped phone call. For some viewers, it was their first time hearing the former President trying to shake down Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffsenperger, over the 2020 election he knew he lost.

Secret recordings existed long before Watergate, but ending a presidency – that was new. The day Butterfield revealed that Nixon bugged his own White House and Camp David, the concept of guilt by audio recording was destined to achieve newfound global attention, especially considering how the entire scandal kicked off with not just burglary, but illegal surveillance of the DNC courtesy of Nixon’s Watergate burglars. As Garrett Graff, author of the recent  Watergate: A New History, puts it, “Watergate was not an event. Watergate was a mindset."

The cultural effect was total, as the 1970s exploded with a new and improved version of an outdated film genre: the conspiracy / paranoia thriller. Movies, music, literature, journalism, and even public figures on Nixon’s enemies list were all inspired by and infected with the bug.

The legal effect manifested with a reset. All 50 states had to reckon with the recording laws they had on the books. Our spy agencies’ long run of eavesdropping on targets with no real oversight got reined in by Congress. A majority of Supreme Court Justices could be counted on to recognize that incriminating evidence was sufficient burden of proof to force a President to hand over damning tapes. Police, lawyers and judges throughout the nation all had to reconsider the role that secretly recorded confessions would play in their cases.

A half-century later, it’s a story still being explored, and presented from different points of view, one that continually evolves into exhaustive but never definitive versions. Even the very notion of wearing a wire has inspired decades-old television genres like the procedural drama to new heights.

The years may pass, but the raw power of audio evidence remains as essential as ever, especially when politicians are involved. Inextricably linked is the perennial tendency of GOP lawmakers to say one thing in public and the opposite in private. Which is how, once again, it’s summer in America and a Congressional select committee investigation is in the televised hearings phase of yet another corrupt, racist Republican President’s crimes and subsequent coverup.

It’s too soon to know which, if any, of Trump’s grab bag of crimes lead to indictments. But high atop the list is his fake elector scheme. The DOJ and Georgia’s Fulton County DA, Fani Willis, have been separately pursuing criminal investigations into the sprawling conspiracy for months. It took awhile, but reporting recently confirmed the Justice Department has been zeroing in on Trump’s actions to overturn the election results. In establishing Trump’s consciousness of guilt, that surreptitiously recorded call with Raffensperger could well be Exhibit A in both courts. Technology may change, but the evergreen method to catch a thief remains the same: hit record when a criminal starts talking behind closed doors.

In the hierarchy of documenting crimes, video supersedes audio. Though there are exceptions. When it comes to incriminating admissible evidence like phone calls, it’s understood that video isn’t always an option. Raffensperger intuited this perfectly. And The Washington Post did too, publishing the audio on January 3, 2021, less than a day after the call took place. So when decision time comes for the D.C. and Georgia grand juries to make up their minds, if hearing a 67-minute call of a President strong-arming a high ranking state official into joining his coup isn’t already sufficient, then video is irrelevant.

Now imagine if, back on January 2, 2021, Raffensperger contacted The Washington Post about Trump’s call - but there was no recording. They’d have still covered it, but it would have likely faded from the collective national memory (or at least those following reliable news outlets). This is not unlike when the Post reported that Trump called Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and tried browbeating him into convincing the state legislature to magically overturn President-elect Biden’s victory in the state on December 5, 2020. Or likewise -  on January 9, 2021 the Post reported of a call Trump made on December 23, 2021 to Raffensperger’s chief elections investigator, Frances Watson, pressuring her to find nonexistent fraudulent ballots. Raffensperger has already testified to Georgia’s special grand jury, while Kemp has gone the other route by attempting to resist his subpoena.

In a bizarre twist attesting to the power of audio evidence, on March 11, 2021, the Post had to publish a major correction to the Watson article. In that January article, they attributed quotes to Trump which, while close in sentiment, were misquotes. How’d they figure this out? A newly discovered recording, of course.

A whopping 17.7 million Americans watched the eighth January 6th hearing, airing during primetime. The first hearing, also primetime, garnered an even larger audience with nearly 20 million viewers. Impressively, even the six daytime hearings notched an average of 12.3 million tuning in. For context, these are comparable numbers to NBA Finals, NFL Primetime, and the major networks’ top 2 shows, NCIS and FBI. Since Nielsen ratings only account for the networks, untold millions more have watched them on other channels and streamed online.

But comparing viewership of the January 6 hearings to Watergate doesn’t work for all the obvious reasons. With only a handful of channels to choose from, over the course of 7 months in 1973, it’s estimated that roughly 80% of Americans saw at least some of the 51 televised hearings (plus 7 days of televised House impeachment hearings between May and July 1974) via telecast. For those who missed the live afternoon hearings which alternated between CBS, NBC and ABC, they could catch the primetime re-air on PBS.

Just as the power of television was more dominant in the 1970s, the strength of polling was once a somewhat reliable indicator. To gauge the damage the Watergate hearings did to public opinion; look to the famous “How Watergate Changed Public Opinion of Richard Nixon” Gallup polls graph (i.e, an OG how it started v how it’s going). Over the course of 447 days, this was the upshot from polling taken around these seminal periods:

Day 1: May 18, 1973 - Senate Watergate Hearings begin airing

19% “Think President Nixon should be removed from office”

44% “Approve of the job Richard Nixon is doing as president”

Day 447: August 8, 1974 – Nixon resigns the presidency

57% “Think President Nixon should be removed from office”

24%  “Approve of the job Richard Nixon is doing as president”

In the span of 15 months – from the 1st Watergate hearing to the day Nixon resigned – the American electorate proved that public sentiment could be moved to end a Presidency. The Nixon-era media environment didn’t allow for memory-holing the Watergate break-in. News of a cover up heard on a “smoking gun” tape made its way into most Americans’ homes. Polling reflected that the mood of the nation wasn’t up for letting a criminal President hang around. 1970s-era GOP Congressmen and Senators, who had previously let Nixon slide, were willing to tell him that if he didn’t resign, the House would impeach and the Senate would convict. Mutually agreed upon reality simply wasn’t up for debate.

Today, however, the disinformation and misinformation wrought from our fractured information ecosystem has flattened both the power of television and the strength of polling. All of which points to the biggest difference between the January 6th hearings and Watergate (aside from hotel break-in vs. attempt to overthrow democracy). Viewers aren’t watching because of a lack of bombshells emerging in the January 6 hearings. Rather, countless bombshells have been popping off. The problem is they’re the kinds which, in the 1970s news era, would’ve been sufficient for a political party to cut ties with a President, but not in 2022 with the modern GOP.

The January 6 committee’s work remains in active investigation mode, with hearings scheduled to return in September (provided no surprise witnesses pop up in August). With no way of knowing how long the committee’s work will last, it’s anyone’s guess if this is the beginning, middle, or end phase. However, with midterm elections less than 100 days out, if Democrats lose their House majority, then Republicans have vowed to shut down the committee entirely, likely as early as January 21, 2023. Until then, we await the verdict for what audio evidence of crimes means in 2022 – both at the ballot box on November 8th, and in 2 heavily watched courts of law.