The TV News Archive is working on
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 5:30 am
Meanwhile, the story continues to unfold. On May 11, Sarah Huckabee, deputy White House press secretary, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos that the president had confirmed this assertion with her directly. And Trump himself told NBC News’ Lester Holt that the assurances came during a private dinner and twice over the phone. And on Friday morning, Trump tweeted that Comey “better hope there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
Some Watergate history, please
Many commentators this week have noted parallels between Trump’s firing of Comey and the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when President Richard Nixon ordered independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired, during the Watergate investigation; his boss, Attorney General Elliot Richardson, and Deputy General William Ruckelshaus, both of whom refused to fire Cox, resigned in protest. Acting head of the Department of Justice, Robert Bork, carried out the order to fire Cox. (Note: the Richard Nixon Library playfully, but accurately, fired off a tweet noting that Nixon had never fired an FBI director, and then later was criticized for buy sales lead doing so by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers presidential libraries.)
While the TV News Archive’s collection of 1.3 million TV news shows dates back to 2009, long after the Nixon era, some footage from that time is available from later airings. Here, for example, is footage of Cox’s press conference right before he was dismissed.
And here is a quick explainer of the Saturday Night Massacre, as broadcast by MSNBC in 2013.
Searching Trump Archive for past Trump statements about Comey
The largely hand-curated Trump Archive, a collection of Trump statements and appearances on TV news broadcasts, makes it easier to find past instances of Trump talking about Comey. ways to make the creation of such collections less labor intensive, by using machine learning tools to identify instances of public officials speaking within the collection of 1.3 million tv news shows.
Some Watergate history, please
Many commentators this week have noted parallels between Trump’s firing of Comey and the Saturday Night Massacre of 1973, when President Richard Nixon ordered independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired, during the Watergate investigation; his boss, Attorney General Elliot Richardson, and Deputy General William Ruckelshaus, both of whom refused to fire Cox, resigned in protest. Acting head of the Department of Justice, Robert Bork, carried out the order to fire Cox. (Note: the Richard Nixon Library playfully, but accurately, fired off a tweet noting that Nixon had never fired an FBI director, and then later was criticized for buy sales lead doing so by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers presidential libraries.)
While the TV News Archive’s collection of 1.3 million TV news shows dates back to 2009, long after the Nixon era, some footage from that time is available from later airings. Here, for example, is footage of Cox’s press conference right before he was dismissed.
And here is a quick explainer of the Saturday Night Massacre, as broadcast by MSNBC in 2013.
Searching Trump Archive for past Trump statements about Comey
The largely hand-curated Trump Archive, a collection of Trump statements and appearances on TV news broadcasts, makes it easier to find past instances of Trump talking about Comey. ways to make the creation of such collections less labor intensive, by using machine learning tools to identify instances of public officials speaking within the collection of 1.3 million tv news shows.