Trump warns Comey: Better hope no ‘tapes’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Friday shot a sharp warning at his ousted FBI director about possible “tapes” of their disputed private conversations.
Trump’s top spokesman refused to comment on whether listening devices are active in the Oval Office or elsewhere. Trump’s warning to fired FBI Director James Comey prompted new accusations of interference in an investigation into allegations of collaboration between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign last year.
Democrats quickly seized on the dispute, demanding that the White House turn over any tapes that might exist of the president’s conversations with Comey.
Trump’s behavior raises “the specter of possible intimidation and obstruction of justice,” wrote Reps. John Conyers of Michigan and Elijah Cummings of Maryland, ranking Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, in a letter to White House counsel Don McGahn. “The president’s actions also risk undermining the ongoing criminal and
counterintelligence investigations and the independence of federal law enforcement agencies.”
The letter noted that “it is a crime to intimidate or threaten any potential witness with the intent to influence, delay or prevent their official testimony.”
In an interview with Fox News on Friday, Trump declined to comment on whether he has listening devices in the White House.
“Well, that I can’t talk about. I won’t talk about that. All I want is for Comey to be honest. And I hope he will be,” Trump said.
For a president whose tweets frequently rattle Washington — and foreign capitals — Trump’s message early Friday morning was particularly jarring: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” the president wrote.
The tweet appeared to refer to a series of three conversations in which, Trump claims, Comey assured him he was not under FBI investigation as part of the bureau’s probe into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Comey has not explicitly denied the account. But sources close to him have cast doubt on the president’s account, noting it would be extraordinary for an FBI director to discuss an open investigation.
On Friday, a person close to the former director recounted a different version. At a oneon-one dinner at the White House in January, Trump asked Comey to pledge his loyalty to the president and Comey declined, instead offering to be honest with him, according the person, who requested anonymity to discuss private conversations.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer denied that account, insisting that the president simply “wants loyalty to this country and the rule of law.” Details of the dinner were first reported by The New York Times.
No president in the past 40 years has been known to regularly tape his phone calls or meetings because, among other reasons, they could be subpoenaed by investigators as they were during the Watergate investigation that ultimately forced President Richard Nixon
to resign. Phone calls with foreign leaders, though, are typically transcribed with the knowledge of other participants.
Trump was widely known to record some phone conversations at his office in Trump Tower during his business career, sometimes remarking to aides after a call as to whether he had taped it.
“I would note that New York is a one-party consent state, and President Trump has always abided by the law,” said Sam Nunberg, a former campaign aide. Federal law and the law in New York state do not require both parties on a call to be aware that it was being recorded. In Florida, where the president frequently spends weekends, both parties must consent to recording. Democrats expressed shock. “For a president who baselessly accused his predecessor of illegally wiretapping him, that Mr. Trump would suggest that he, himself, may have engaged in such conduct is staggering,” said Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “The president should immediately provide any such recordings to Congress or admit, once again, to have made a deliberately misleading — and in this case threatening — statement.”
Spicer, who kept his answers short during Friday’s briefing and largely dodged specific questions about Trump’s meeting with Comey, said he was not aware that any recording of the Trump-Comey meeting exists.
He denied that the president was threatening the former FBI director. “That’s not a threat,” Spicer said. “He simply stated a fact. The tweet speaks for itself. I’m moving on.”
COMEY MUM FOR NOW
Associates of the former FBI director, who remained out of sight Friday at his suburban Virginia home, said they believed any tapes would validate Comey’s side of the story.
It was not clear when Comey would speak for himself. He declined an invitation to appear at a closed meeting of the Senate intelligence committee next week.
But Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., the committee’s chairman, said he expects Comey will speak privately with committee members. Burr said the committee’s staff would likely “work something out in the nottoo-distant future” for a meeting with Comey.
The face-to-face dinner meeting between the president and the director raised other concerns. It came just days after the FBI interviewed Trump’s then-national security adviser Mike Flynn about his conversations with the Russian ambassador and a day after acting Attorney General Sally Yates first alerted the White House that she believed Flynn had lied about the conversations and could be blackmailed by Moscow.
Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper said Friday that Comey was uneasy about attending the dinner because of the “appearance of compromising the independence of the FBI, which is a hallowed tenet in our system.”
Clapper also told MSNBC that he didn’t know whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials, contradicting the president’s assertion that the former director had cleared him of wrongdoing.
The controversy has obliterated any momentum from the House passage of the Republican health care bill last week and threatens to overshadow Trump’s first international trip, beginning next week, in which the president will meet with leaders in both the Middle East and Europe.
Trump, in an NBC interview on Thursday, said that he had been intending to fire Comey — whom he derided as a “showboat” and “grandstander” — for months and that it had nothing to do with the Russia investigation. But he also said, “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a madeup story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”
Even before Trump’s tweets, the White House was scrambling to clarify why Comey was fired. It initially cited a Justice Department memo criticizing Comey’s handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails as the impetus, only to have that version undercut by Trump himself.
Trump said Friday morning that no one should expect his White House to give completely accurate information.
“As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!” he wrote on Twitter, adding, “Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???” Information for this article was contributed by Jonathan Lemire, Jake Pearson, Julie Pace, Eileen Sullivan, Deb Riechmann and Vivian Salama of The Associated Press and by Peter Baker, Michael D. Shear, Charlie Savage, Matt Apuzzo, Gardiner Harris and Maggie Haberman of The New York Times.