The National Archives released on Thursday new recordings of President Richard Nixon’s grand jury testimony in the Watergate scandal. 
 
 Overall, what's your impression about former President Richard Nixon? 
 
 Never-before released grand jury testimony by disgraced former President Richard Nixon has been posted online. 
 
 The testimony and a trove of other Watergate-related material were made available at the Nixon Presidential Library’s website on Thursday. 
 
 The move comes four months after a federal judge ordered the information's release, citing its historical importance. 
 
 Included is Nixon's grand jury testimony, which he gave 10 months after his August 1974 resignation. During it, the Republican answers a special prosecutor's questions about the Watergate scandal, which ultimately brought down his presidency. 
 
 Among the topics covered by the grand jury investigation was the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in a tape recording between Nixon and his chief of staff. The missing tape recorded a conversation between the men three days after a June 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee's Watergate office complex headquarters. 
 
 "This is Nixon unplugged," historian Stanley Kutler told the Associated Press. He had sued to obtain the records. 
 
 The library is also releasing thousands of pages of Watergate-era documents, video oral histories and a 45-minute recording Nixon made with a dictating machine. 
 
 Historians won access to the grand jury testimony over the objections of the Obama administration. White House officials argued that too many authorities from that era are still alive for secret testimony involving them to be made public. 
 
 But U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth sided with historians in July. "The court is confident that disclosure will greatly benefit the public and its understanding of Watergate without compromising the tradition and objectives of grand jury secrecy," Lamberth wrote in his decision. 
 
 Some portions of the grand jury testimony will be removed to safeguard national security or the privacy of people who are still alive. 
 
 With News Wire Services ||||| In long-secret testimony, Richard Nixon swore to grand jurors that the famous gap in a White House tape was merely an accident. 
 
 The 18 1/2 missing minutes of a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff were considered crucial in determining the president's role in covering up the Watergate scandal that drove him from office. Under oath, after he left office, he was no help to investigators probing what was said during the gap. 
 
 The National Archives and its Nixon Presidential Library released a transcript of the testimony Thursday, a rare look inside grand jury proceedings. 
 
 Nixon told grand jurors that in his view, it was simply an accident that some of the tape got erased. He claimed "I practically blew my stack" when he found out how much.
– The public finally got to hear Richard Nixon’s long-sealed grand jury testimony regarding Watergate today—and what they heard didn’t amount to much. Asked to explain the infamous 18½ missing minutes of tape, Nixon said it was probably just erased by accident. “I practically blew my stack” when I found out how much had been lost, he said. The AP concludes that he “was no help to investigators” in reconstructing the missing conversation. Nixon gave the testimony 10 months after leaving office. Typically such testimony is kept sealed, but historian Stanley Kutler sued to have it released, arguing that it was too historically significant to keep sealed away, the New York Daily News explains.