It would certainly be disputed by former chiefs of The Times’s Washington bureau. “The bureau was very busy chasing presidential secrets, most of them pretty seamy,” said Michael Oreskes, the chief from 1997 to 2000, during President Bill Clinton’s second term. “Since President Clinton denied the affair for a long time, we chased the secret relationship between Bill and Monica,” she said. The Times, Mr. Frankel recalled, was looking closely into the sources of the Watergate burglars’ money and into the question of who had erased critical conversations taped at the White House. All the digging in the world may not yield results, as Dean Baquet, the bureau chief from 2007 to 2011 and now The Times’s executive editor, noted.

Source: New York Times March 11, 2017 17:15 UTC