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| Donald Trump walks across the South Lawn at the White House. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) |
Is Trump taping conversations at the White House?
Friday morning, President Trump took to Twitter to launch a series of bizarre complaints — beginning with the allegation that the entire Russia issue was fabricated, veering into threats to cancel the White House press briefing, and culminating with a claim that he had secret “tapes” of his conversations with fired FBI Director James Comey.
All in all, it was a worrying series of statements from the president at a time of national crisis.
The White House later refused to say whether the president tapes his visitors.
- Comey, for one, probably does hope there are tapes, a source close to him told NBC. [Katy Turner / Twitter]
In White House Press Briefings, No Degree of Accuracy Required
President Trump has given his press team a “say anything” hall pass, leaving many to wonder what happens to a nation once a president drops even the pretense of accuracy.
-- Irate about the wall-to-wall coverage of the contradictions and inconsistencies in his and his staff’s evolving statements, the president also threatened this morning to cancel the daily press briefings:
The biggest news out of Donald Trump’s Thursday interview with NBC was his confession that the Russia investigation was on his mind when he fired FBI director James Comey. Undercutting 48 hours of denials by his aides, the president said: “In fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made up story, it’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.’”
Legal experts and DOJ veterans, meanwhile, express doubts about Trump’s account of his conversation with Comey, Devlin Barrett and Philip Rucker report on the front page of The Post. “I just can’t even begin to think about that comment being true,” said Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland who previously worked in the Justice Department. “It defies belief in general because of the practices of not commenting on investigations, and it would especially defy belief in the case of Comey, who prides himself on strict observance of propriety.” Greenberger noted....
...a senior FBI official also said Comey would never have told the president he was not under investigation. "He tried to stay away from it [the Russian-ties investigation]," the official, who worked closely with Comey and keeps in touch with him, per Ken Dilanian and Pete Williams. "He would say, 'Look sir, I really can't get into it, and you don't want me to.'"
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Trump’s tweets this morning will dramatically ratchet up the pressure on Comey to testify before Congress so that he can sort all this out, as well as clear his name. If he does not rebut the president’s version of events, Comey’s legacy will suffer. Sens. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Mark Warner (D-Va.) have invited Comey to address the Senate Intelligence Committee next Tuesday, but he still has not responded. [ P.S.: Comey will not appear in a closed session before the Senate Intelligence Committee... Warner announced that Comey would not be appearing before his panel in an interview on MSNBC Friday--Politico
-- Even if Comey said what Trump claims, Eugene Robinson notes that typical investigative procedure is to start at the bottom of an organization and work your way up: “‘You are not under investigation’ does not mean ‘you will never be under investigation.’”
-- There’s another question also worth considering: If the focus of an investigation asks an FBI agent whether he or she is under investigation, does the agent have to tell the truth? “I was a criminal investigator for years, and if someone had asked me if they were under investigation and they were under investigation, I would have said no,” Dana Ridenour, who spent 21 years with the FBI as a special agent, told Philip Bump. The reason was simple: She wouldn’t want to tip off the target of the investigation. “As a criminal investigator,” she said, “I don’t know of any reason I would have to disclose to somebody that they were under investigation.”
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...testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe directly rejected the White House’s characterization of the Russian probe as a low priority and delivered a passionate defense of Comey. From Matt Zapotosky and Karoun Demirjian: “McCabe, who had been the No. 2 official in the FBI until President Trump fired Comey this week, said that the bureau considered the probe of possible coordination between the Kremlin and the Trump team during the 2016 election campaign a ‘highly significant investigation’
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-- This story is likely to dominate the news at least through next week.
- ... Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — whose pre-Comey reputation as an apolitical straight shooter has been seriously tarnished, at the very least, since he wrote the memo initially used to justify the FBI director’s firing — is going to brief the full Senate next week. It may not surprise you that Senate Democrats have a lot of questions for him. [Washington Post / Ed O’Keefe and Paul Kane]
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-- Trump’s admission that the Russia investigation weighed heavily on his deliberations about firing Comey will also create new headaches for Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions, who admittedly consulted with the president as he made the decision, recused himself from the Russia probe and all matters relating to the 2016 campaign, including the investigation into Clinton’s server.
“Refusing to recuse oneself from a conflict or breaking the promise to recuse from a conflict is a serious breach of legal ethics,” conservative Post blogger Jennifer Rubin writes.
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Michael Gerson, a former top speechwriter for George W. Bush, writes in his column that “all of this is consistent with — even mandated by — Trump’s contempt for institutions”: “This was always the main question: Would President Trump go beyond mere Twitter abuse and move against institutions that limit his power? By any reasonable standard, we now have an answer. … He has called the FBI investigation process ‘rigged.’ If the system is dirty, only a fool would not play by the same rules. This is the logic of conspiratorial disdain for government. An independent, nonpolitical FBI? What a joke. It is all political. And politics is power. And power is making people do what you want, or destroying those who get in your way. The gospel according to Nixon…
“It is dangerous to have a leader with disdain for the law. It is also dangerous to have a leader who believes that anything legal is permissible,” Gerson adds. “Trump’s firing of Comey was legal. It also violated a democratic norm — a proper presidential deference for an ongoing investigation and the independence of law enforcement. There is no evidence that such considerations even occur to Trump. In their place: What kind of sucker would not press all his advantages? ...
- Charles Krauthammer thinks Comey probably needed to go, but the conservative columnist believes Trump could easily have arranged for him to gracefully step aside: “Instead we got this — a political ax murder, brutal even by Washington standards....If Trump thought this would kill the (Russia) inquiry and the story, or perhaps even just derail it somewhat, he’s made the blunder of the decade. Whacking Comey has brought more critical attention to the Russia story than anything imaginable. … So why did he do it? Now we know: The king asked whether no one would rid him of this troublesome priest, and got so impatient he did it himself.”
A few hours after Trump fired Comey, a prominent Republican politician gave David Ignatius this blunt assessment....The Trump presidency is a test. We’ll find out how strong our institutions are and, even more, whether this generation of leaders is worthy of our Founding Fathers. So far, the evidence is mixed.”
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Inside the West Wing, the mood right now is dour. From Politico: “Several White House officials said aides who didn’t need to see the president stayed away from the Oval Office — and kept their doors closed. … Trump did the lengthy interview with Holt even though some on his staff believed it was a bad idea and gave his answers off-the-cuff. One person who spoke to him said he’d been ‘fixated’ on his news coverage and believed his press team was failing him and that he needed ‘to take the situation into his own hands.’ …
“The episode highlights two fundamental issues of the Trump presidency: It is often impossible to work for Trump in the White House — and it is often impossible for Trump to be happy with those who work for him. ...
“Another White House official said there is a ‘widespread recognition this was handled terribly but not a real sense that we can do much here.
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