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Amid threats, Comey fallout continues
On Twitter, Trump raises specter of conversation ‘tapes’
WASHINGTON — Administration efforts to contain the damage from the firing of FBI Director James Comey were again thwarted by President Donald Trump, who suggested Friday that he has secretly recorded conversations in the White House.
“Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” the president wrote Friday morning as part of a series of Twitter posts expressing frustration with the persistence of a story he has continued to fuel.
Asked if Trump has such recordings, White House press secretary Sean Spicer repeatedly refused to answer.
Trump also declined to answer a question about taping.
“That I can’t talk about. I won’t talk about that,” he said in an interview on Fox News.
Trump’s taunting tweet appeared to be a response to a New York Times story citing two close associates of Comey who related what they said was his account of a January dinner between him and the president. During that dinner, Trump asked that Comey pledge loyalty to him, the associates said, something Comey declined to do and later expressed concern about.
The article said Comey had told the associates about the dinner on condition that they not talk to others about it while he served in his post, a condition that ended when Trump fired him Tuesday.
According to the article, Comey said he pledged his honesty and explained the tradition of political independence in his position.
The White House confirmed that the two had dinner, but disputed Comey’s account of the conversation.
Democrats and former prosecutors called the White House refusal to rule out the possibility of a surreptitious recording system extraordinary. Presidents starting with at least Dwight D. Eisenhower are known to have taped conversations in the White House, but the practice was believed to have ended after it became a central part of the scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.
Rep. Adam Schiff, DCalif., the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, and others called for the president to either immediately turn over any recordings to Congress or admit that none exists. If such recordings exist, they would be considered presidential records, which must be preserved under postWatergate federal law.
Trump’s tweet came less than 24 hours after he provided a timeline of the decision to dismiss Comey which contradicted what his communications team and even his own vice president had stated days earlier.
Speaking to NBC News, Trump said he had planned to fire Comey with or without a memo from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein spelling out reasons why the bureau would benefit from new leadership. He added in the interview that he was concerned about the “Russia thing.”
In another tweet, he insisted again that neither he nor his associates had colluded with Russian agents to influence the 2016 campaign. He said former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt” had confirmed as much.
Clapper denied that Friday.
“I don’t know if there was collusion or not. I don’t know if there is evidence of collusion or not, nor should I have in this particular context,” Clapper told MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell. Although he had worked closely with Comey, the FBI would not have told him about a domestic criminal or counterintelligence investigation of that sort, he said.
A previous statement he made in which he said he had seen “no evidence” of collusion referred only to evidence gathered by intelligence agencies, not the FBI, Clapper said.
A spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said that Rosenstein has agreed to brief the full Senate next week about the Russia investigation and his involvement in the decision to fire Comey.
Comey, though, has declined an invitation to appear before the Senate intelligence committee, although the panel’s senior Democratic member, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, held out the possibility that he might testify in the future.
“It is our hope that in the not too distant future that we can find time for him to come in and talk to the committee,” Warner said on MSNBC.
The White House, meantime, released the text of a letter from a law firm representing Trump that it claimed corroborated the president’s contention that there is no Russian involvement in his personal or business interests.
Attorneys from the Washington office of the law firm Morgan Lewis, in a letter addressed to Trump that was written two months ago, said a review of his tax returns did not show income from Russian sources or debt owed to Russian lenders — “with a few exceptions.” Those included roughly $12 million he received for hosting the Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and $95 million he got for the sale of an estate in Florida to a Russian billionaire. That amount was far more than what Trump had paid for the property.
The letter left numerous questions unanswered. For example, while it said that Trump had mostly not received money from Russian entities, it did not address the possibility of Russians passing money through entities based in other countries. And it covered a 10year period, so it did not say anything about money Trump might have received before 2006.
Spicer insisted Trump had not acted to undermine the FBI’s investigation.
“I think he’s growingly concerned, as well as a number of American people who are growingly concerned that there is this perpetuated false narrative out there. That’s, I think, the nut of this,” he told reporters.