What did Deep Throat know and when did he know it?
William Gaines is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign professor who led the famous class project to uncover Deep Throat and in the process named Fred Fielding. Gaines now admits they were wrong. Deep Throat was Mark Felt. (*) (†)
Nevertheless, key questions remain. Gaines states these in terms of how he was led to believe Deep Throat was Fiedling and not Felt. How did Deep Throat know that there were suspicious gaps on the White House tapes, months after Felt had left the FBI? The FBI would not have had access to this information normally. Gaines writes:
In November 1973, according to the book [All the President’s Men], Throat told Woodward by phone that the Nixon tapes had gaps of a suspicious nature that could have been deliberate. When the students checked the newspaper reports of that week, they found that quotation from Throat to be attributed to a White House source. The FBI is an agency of the Justice Department, outside the gates of the White House.
(undated article on front page of deepthroatuncovered.com)
The possible resolutions to this are one of the following four. (1) Woodward and Bernstein simply lied about this statement by Deep Throat. He never said it. (2) “Deep Throat” was a composite. He was partially Felt and partially someone at the White House. (3) Felt and the FBI had illegal access to information at the White House. (4) Felt had his own “deep throat” source who worked at the White House and fed him information.
I’d like to know which one it is.