Former associates report the president has long history of secretly recording calls
WASHINGTON — Throughout Donald Trump’s business career, some executives who came to work for him were taken aside by colleagues and warned to assume that their discussions with the boss were being recorded.
“There was never any sense with Donald of the phone being used for private conversation,” said John O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino.
For O’Donnell and others who have had regular dealings with Trump through the years, there was something viscerally real about the threat implied by the president’s tweet Friday morning warning that fired FBI Director James Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
“Talking on the phone with Donald was a public experience,” said O’Donnell, author of a book about his former boss, “Trumped: The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump.” “You never knew who else was listening.”
Perplexing tweet
The president’s tweet remained something of a puzzle Friday, as White House press secretary Sean Spicer rebuffed questions about whether Trump had indeed recorded the three conversations in which he says Comey assured him that the president was not under investigation.
“The president has nothing further to add on that,” Spicer said three times. He refused to say whether the White House still has an active taping system.
It has for most of the past 70 years. In the popular imagination, White House taping started and ended with President Richard M. Nixon’s incriminating recordings of his plotting to cover up the Watergate burglary and other crimes. Nixon’s presidency was ultimately undone in 1974 by the revelation of Oval Office recordings.
But tape recording has been an important and aboveboard part of presidential procedure since a voice-recording system was first installed under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to capture the content of news conferences. The recording mechanism was disabled under Dwight Eisenhower and reinstalled by John F. Kennedy, who recorded Oval Office conversations with hidden microphones, securing intimate exchanges about the Cuban missile crisis and other signal moments of those years. Oval Office recordings of Lyndon B. Johnson’s colorful, cursing chatter and Nixon’s dark scheming have entertained and appalled generations of history students.
Dems seek recordings
Two House Democrats on Friday sent a letter to White House counsel Donald McGahn, seeking the release of any tapes or other communications between Trump and Comey. Trump’s tweet raised “the specter of possible intimidation and obstruction of justice,” wrote Reps. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan and Elijah Cummings of Maryland.
Trump’s warning tweet to Comey appeared to be a response to a New York Times report that said Trump had twice asked the FBI director at a White House dinner for the two men if he would promise the president his loyalty. Comey reportedly said that he would offer the president only his honesty.