Trump insists he has no Comey recordings

POLITICS: U.S. president says via Twitter that he doesn’t have tapes of conversations with former FBI director

American President Donald Trump said he doesn’t have recordings of his conversations with then-FBI director James Comey, capping weeks of speculation — started by the president himself — about whether such tapes exist.

“With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey,” Trump said Thursday in a pair of statements on Twitter, “but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.”

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders declined to elaborate in a briefing with reporters afterward.

“The president’s statement via Twitter today is extremely clear,” she said. “I don’t have anything to add.” Asked if Trump believes U.S. intelligence agencies are monitoring his conversations in the White House, Sanders said, “Not that I’m aware of.”

Trump raised the question of whether he was taping his Oval Office conversations when, days after firing Comey on May 9, he blasted out a series of tweets suggesting the existence of tapes as a way to try to deter the ousted FBI chief from talking to reporters.

“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump wrote.

He concluded with a tweet calling the investigation into Russian interference in the election and his campaign’s possible involvement a “witch hunt,” asking, “when does it end?”

Representative Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, which has requested information about whether recordings exist as part of its investigation into Russian meddling in the election, said the panel still had not gotten official word from the White House.

“This raises a lot of questions about why he would suggest in the first place there were tapes, what he hoped to gain from that?” Schiff said.

“And, moreover, why he kept the country guessing about this issue for weeks, and weeks and weeks.”

Meanwhile, it was claimed Thursday that German intelligence agents systematically spied on the White House and U.S. government departments over a number of years.

The damaging allegations could prove highly embarrassing for Chancellor Angela Merkel and expose her to charges of hypocrisy over her outrage in 2013, when it emerged that the U.S. had tapped her mobile phone.

At that time, Merkel had famously declared: “Spying among friends is not on.”