"At approximately 1:14 (a minute, 14 seconds into the audio, which can be heard here), the tone of the recording change to where to me, it sounds like someone is holding a digital recorder up to a speaker, so it's a microphone-to-speaker transfer of that information. That's a pretty big deal because it raises the first red flag about there possibly being some editing," he said.
The next part that raises questions is two minutes, six seconds in, through two minutes, nine seconds in, he said.
"I can hear noise in the room, along with the increase in the noise floor. I can hear a file door being closed, I can hear some papers being shuffled. so I'm further convinced that, beginning at 1:14 continuing through 2:06 to 2:15, it's a digital recorder being held up to a speaker."
"But yet, at 6:17, there's a huge edit because the conversation is cut off. It's interrupted. And the tone changes again," he said. "The noise floor, when you're authenticating a recording from a forensic perspective, is a very important part of the process. All of a sudden, we go back to the same quality and extremely low noise floor that we had at the beginning of the recording."
Someone once reconstructed an entire helicopter's location telemetry just from the dead-air hum recorded by a video camera. Don't underestimate the value of any piece of information. It's a failure if there's needless withholding.
Sometimes I wonder whether some officials are trolling the conspiracy theory people, by editing something without even changing anything, just so people can freak out over it. Or give overlay specific denials just so people go "aha, they only said they never negotiated with Aliens from Mars, not that they didn't meet Aliens from Mars, nor that they didn't negotiate with Aliens from Pluto".