The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WHY TRUMP’S WARNING TO COMEY PROMPTS QUESTIONS
‘Better hope’ there are no secret tapes, Friday tweet says.
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” 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. Trump and his White House aides later refused to say whether the president tapes his visitors.
“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 that Comey had declined to pledge his loyalty during a dinner at the White House earlier this year, an account the president denied. Asked directly about whether there were tapes of his conversations, Trump refused to say.
“That I can’t talk about. I won’t talk about it,” he told Fox News. “All I want is for Comey to be honest.”
An aide to the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, GOP Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, said later Friday that Comey had declined an invitation to testify next week before the committee, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and ties with Trump’s campaign. There was no indication whether Trump’s tweet played a role in Comey’s decision.
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 M. Nixon to resign. Phone calls with foreign leaders, though, 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. “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.”
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 on Friday demanding copies of any recordings if they exist. 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 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.”
The matter arose in a series of early-morning Twitter messages in which Trump appeared agitated over news reports Friday that focused on contradictory accounts of his decision to fire Comey at the same time the FBI is investigating ties between Trump’s associates and Russia. Among other things, he threatened to cancel future White House press briefings.
The president also expressed pique at attention on the shifting versions of how he came to decide to fire Comey. In his first extended comments on the firing Thursday, Trump contradicted statements made by his White House spokeswoman as well as comments made to reporters by Vice President Mike Pence and even the letter the president himself signed and sent to Comey informing him of his dismissal.
The original White House version of the firing was that the president acted on the recommendation of the attorney general and deputy attorney general because of Comey’s 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 when he met with the Justice Department officials and would have done so regardless of any recommendation. He also indicated that he was thinking about the Russia investigation when he made the decision.
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 rhetorical point, and the daily briefing already scheduled for later in the day went forward with Spicer, despite the Twitter post. Spicer declined to say whether the president had decided to stop holding daily news briefings, saying Trump is “a little dismayed” about the unwillingness of reporters to focus on the policy actions of his administration.
Trump has long been said by allies and former employees to have taped some of his own phone calls, as well as meetings in his Trump Tower offices. During the campaign, Trump’s aides working on the fifth floor of Trump Tower told reporters they feared their offices were bugged by the candidate’s security team, and they were careful about what they said.
In this case, however, the Twitter comment comes in the context of an FBI investigation, and some experts said the president was skirting a legal line. Samuel Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor who led the Enron task force, said Trump’s warning on Twitter to quiet Comey could be viewed as an effort to intimidate a witness for any current or future investigation into whether the firing of the FBI director 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.”
The president has said any suspicions of collusion are “fake news” and that the Russia investigation is the product of Democrats who are sore losers looking to explain away an election defeat and undermine his legitimacy.
“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 morning.
He added later that James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, has testified that he knew of no collusion.
“When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?” Trump asked. Lawmakers have given conflicting and vague assessments of the evidence so far. House Intelligence Committee Democrats Schiff and Eric Swalwell of California, have said there is at least some evidence of collusion, but when Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was asked last week if there was, she said, “Not at this time.”