>As Steven Levy has observed, this sort of leak is a digital counterpart to what had been sought by the Watergate burglars by bugging the offices of the DNC — occasioned through hacking, rather than breaking and entering. Watergate thus looms not only as an example of a cover-up that was revealed through whistleblowing — the covered-up burglary was itself a roundly-denounced, and criminal, attempt to procure a political rival’s private conversations.

I'd never heard that the Nixon team planned to release their recordings to the public.