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The National Archives may be able to recover notes concerning the lost 18 and a half minutes of the Watergate tape, Mother Jones reports.

At the request of former National Security Agency analyst Phil Mellinger, the Archives have proposed using forensic techniques to obtain the wiped out information.

The lost minutes are part of a 79-minute conversation between former president Richard Nixon and his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman three days after the break-in at the Watergate Hotel. During the conversation, Haldeman took notes with a ballpoint pen.

Mellinger, who has tracked Watergate for some time, says the notes make no mention of Watergate. They also don’t discuss what was said during those eighteen minutes. The first page of Haldeman’s notes consists of the first four minutes of the conversation. A reference at the top of the second page mentions a "PR program" designed to attack political exploiters of the break-in.

In the Mother Jones story, David Corn notes that there are two explanations for why the gap in Haldeman's notes seems to correspond with a gap in the tape. It’s possible that Haldeman stopped taking notes until the end of the conversation. It also could be the case that his notes from that part of the conversation are missing.

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I’d pay to see the exchange at Aldo Leopold Elementary School tomorrow when 10-year-old Kennedy Corpus’ teacher asks why she wasn’t in school yesterday.

The girl could say that her father took her to see the President at his Town Hall Meeting at Southwest High School.

“Did you bring a note,” the teacher might ask.

“Oh, yes,” Kennedy could say and then hand the teacher a note – not from her dad – but from President Obama.

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