TRUMP WARNING TO COMEY PROMPTS QUESTIONS ON ‘TAPES’
>> WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump on Friday warned James Comey, the FBI director he fired this week, against leaking anything negative about him, saying that Mr 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 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 Mr 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!” Mr Trump wrote on Twitter.
Mr Trump appeared to be referring to an article in The New York Times that said he had asked Mr 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.
Mr 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 Mr Comey’s version of events was false.
Mr 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 were incredulous. “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,” Mr Spicer said, repeating the answer or some variation of it several more times as reporters pressed.
He denied that the president was threatening Mr Comey. “That’s not a threat,” Mr Spicer said. “He simply stated a fact. The tweet speaks for itself. I’m moving on.”
Mr Comey made no comment, but later in the day he declined a request to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday. According to a close associate, Mr Comey is willing to testify, but wants it to be in public.
The matter arose in a series of earlymorning Twitter messages in which Mr Trump appeared agitated over news reports on contradictory accounts of his decision to fire Mr Comey, which came at the same time the FBI is investigating ties between Mr 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 Mr Comey because of his handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email. But in an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Mr Trump said he had already decided to fire Mr 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, Mr Trump said on 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???”
Allies and former employees of Mr Trump have long said that he taped some of his own phone calls, as well as meetings in Trump Tower. During the campaign, Mr 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 Buell, a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor who led the Enron task force, said Mr Trump’s attempt on Twitter to quiet Mr 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 defence 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,” Mr 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.”