Warning to Comey sparks speculation
Questions circle around the possibility of secret ‘tapes’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Friday warned James Comey, the former FBI director he fired this week, against leaking anything negative about him, saying that Comey “better hope” that there are no secret tapes of their conversations that the president could use in retaliation.
The suggestion that the president may be surreptitiously recording his meetings or telephone calls added a sensational new twist at the end of a week that roiled Washington. The president and his spokesman later refused to say whether he tapes his visitors, something Trump was suspected of doing when he was in business in New York.
“James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
Trump appeared to be referring to a report in The New York Times that he had asked Comey to pledge loyalty
during a dinner at the White House shortly after the inauguration, only to be rebuffed by the FBI director who considered it inappropriate.
Trump denied the account but it was not clear whether he was genuinely revealing the existence of clandestine recordings or simply making a rhetorical point that Comey’s version of events was false.
Trump chose not to clarify when asked later in the day by Fox News if there were tapes of conversations. “That I can’t talk about. I won’t talk about it,” he said. “All I want is for Comey to be honest.”
No president in the past 40 years has been known to regularly tape his phone calls or meetings because, among other reasons, the recordings 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 are typically transcribed with the knowledge of other participants.
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.
Reps. John Conyers of Michigan and Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrats on the judiciary and oversight committees, sent a letter to the White House demanding copies of any recordings. 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.”
Asked if the president records his conversations, White House press secretary Sean Spicer would not say. “The president has nothing further to add on that,” Spicer said, repeating the answer or some variation of it several more times as reporters pressed.
He denied that the president was threatening Comey. “That’s not a threat,” Spicer said. “He simply stated a fact. The tweet speaks for itself. I’m moving on.”
Comey made no comment but later in the day declined a request to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, but may do so later.
The matter arose in a series of early-morning Twitter messages in which Trump appeared agitated over news reports on contradictory accounts of his decision to fire Comey, which came at the same time the FBI is investigating ties between Trump’s associates and Russia. Among other things, he threatened to cancel White House briefings.
The White House’s original version of the story was that the president had acted on the recommendation of the attorney general and deputy attorney general and fired Comey because of his handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email. But in an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Trump said he had already decided to fire Comey and would have done so regardless of any recommendation. He also indicated that he was thinking about the Russia investigation when he decided. Implicitly acknowledging that misinformation had been given out, Trump said Friday 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.
“Maybe,” he added a few moments later, “the best thing to do would be to cancel all future ‘press briefings’ and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???”
The threat may have been just a jab — Friday’s briefing went forward as scheduled — but Trump later told Fox that he was thinking about it. “Unless I have them every two weeks and I do them myself, we don’t have them,” he said. “I think it’s a good idea.”
Jeff Mason, a White House correspondent for Reuters and the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, objected.
“Doing away with briefings would reduce accountability, transparency, and the opportunity for Americans to see that, in the U.S. system, no political figure is above being questioned,” he said.
There is precedent for shutting down news briefings during Trump’s presidency. The State Department for decades held daily briefings with only rare and brief interruptions, but such briefings have largely ended during the Trump administration.
Allies and former employees of Trump have long said that he taped some of his own phone calls, as well as meetings in Trump Tower. During the campaign, Trump’s aides told reporters that they feared their offices were bugged and that they were careful about what they said.
In this case, however, the warning came in the context of an FBI investigation. Samuel W. Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor who led the Enron task force, said Trump’s attempt on Twitter to quiet Comey could be viewed as an effort to intimidate a witness for any future investigation into whether the firing amounted to obstruction of justice.
“If this were an actual criminal investigation — in other words, if there were a prosecutor and a defense lawyer in the picture — this would draw a severe phone call to counsel warning that the defendant is at serious risk of indictment if he continues to speak to witnesses,” Buell said. “Thus, this is also definitive evidence that Trump is not listening to counsel and perhaps not even talking to counsel. Unprecedented in the modern presidency.”
Trump’s mention of tapes did nothing to dispel the echoes of Watergate heard in Washington this week. His dismissal of Comey in the midst of an investigation into Trump’s associates struck many as similar to Nixon’s decision in October 1973 to fire Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor who demanded secret White House tapes, in an episode that came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
The difference, according to Luke A. Nichter, a historian at Texas A&M University who has specialized in the tapes, is that “Nixon’s rantings were done in private,” and he did not cancel press briefings. “The reason I have a hard time with the label Nixonian is that we’ve surpassed it,” Nichter said. “To be Trumpian is something of a greater magnitude than simply being Nixonian.”
Trump’s defenders have said that Watergate comparisons are overwrought and that there is no evidence of collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia during last year’s election. The president has called the suspicions “fake news” concocted by sore-loser Democrats looking to explain an election defeat.
“Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election,” he wrote on Twitter on Friday.