WASHINGTON — President Trump on Friday warned James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director he fired this week,
against leaking anything negative about the president and put the news
media on notice that he may cancel future White House briefings.
In
a series of early-morning posts on Twitter, Mr. Trump even seemed to
suggest that there may be secret tapes of his conversations with Mr.
Comey that could be used to counter the former F.B.I. director if
necessary. It was not immediately clear whether he meant that literally,
or simply hoped to intimidate Mr. Comey into silence.
“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 agitated over news reports on Friday that focused on
contradictory accounts of his decision to fire Mr. Comey at the same
time the F.B.I. is investigating ties between Mr. Trump’s associates and
Russia.
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The New York Times reported
that, in a dinner shortly after his inauguration, Mr. Trump asked Mr.
Comey to pledge loyalty to him, which the F.B.I. director refused to do.
The story cited two people who heard Mr. Comey describe the dinner, but
the White House rebutted the account.
The president also expressed pique at attention on the shifting versions
of how he came to decide to fire Mr. Comey. In his first extended
comments on the firing on Thursday, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Comey’s 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. And he
indicated that he was thinking about the Russia investigation when he
made the decision.
Graphic
The Events That Led Up to Comey’s Firing, and How the White House’s Story Changed
White House officials initially said President Trump
acted based on the recommendation of Justice Department officials, but
Mr. Trump later said he would have fired the F.B.I. director regardless.
Mr. Trump said on Friday morning 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, but Mr. Trump by his own
description likes to be unpredictable and does not feel obligated to
follow longstanding White House conventions simply because that is the
way things have been done for years. Every president in modern times has
been frustrated with the news media at points, but they all preserved
the tradition of the daily briefing, if for no other reason than to get
their message out. Mr. Trump, with Twitter as his own trumpet, may feel
less need for that.
There
is already precedent for shutting down news briefings during Mr.
Trump’s presidency. The State Department for decades held daily
briefings with only rare and brief interruptions in a process that was
important not only to inform reporters of administration policy, but
foreign governments and even the department’s own far-flung diplomats.
But such briefings have largely ended during the Trump administration.
Mr.
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, Mr. 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.
But
the implicit threat to Mr. Comey was ripped from a familiar playbook
that Mr. Trump relied on during the campaign to silence critics or
dissent. During the Republican primaries, he read aloud the mobile telephone number
of one rival, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, from the stage
at a rally and encouraged people to flood his phone with calls.
At another point, he threatened on Twitter to tell stories
about Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the co-hosts of the MSNBC
show “Morning Joe,” after they criticized him. He also railed against
the wealthy Ricketts family as it was funding anti-Trump efforts,
threatening to air some unspecified dirty laundry. And while competing
with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas for the Republican presidential
nomination, he threatened to expose something unflattering about his opponent’s wife. “Be careful, Lyin’ Ted, or I will spill the beans on your wife!” he said.
In
this case, however, the Twitter comment comes in the context of an
F.B.I. investigation, and some experts said the president was skirting a
legal line. Samuel W. Buell,
a Duke University law professor and former federal prosecutor who led
the Enron task force, said that although it was ambiguous whether firing
Mr. Comey in the first place amounted to obstruction of justice, Mr. Trump’s threats on Twitter to quiet Mr. Comey could more clearly fall into that category.
“Obstruction
of an obstruction investigation is also obstruction,” Mr. Buell said.
“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. 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.”
This
is not the first time an administration has challenged Mr. Comey’s
version of a prominent conversation. During President George W. Bush’s
administration, White House officials disputed Mr. Comey’s account of a
hospital room standoff in which Mr. Bush’s top aides tried to pressure
John D. Ashcroft, the ailing attorney general, to reauthorize a
controversial surveillance program.
Mr.
Comey, then the deputy attorney general, was eventually vindicated
because the F.B.I. director at the time, Robert S. Mueller III, kept his notes from the encounter — a reminder that note-taking is steeped in the F.B.I. culture.
Mr.
Trump’s mention of tapes did nothing to dispel the echoes of Watergate
heard in Washington this week. His dismissal of Mr. Comey in the midst
of an investigation into Mr. Trump’s associates struck many as similar
to President Richard M. Nixon’s decision in October 1973 to fire
Archibald Cox, the Watergate special prosecutor, in an episode that came
to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
In
that case, Nixon was mad at Mr. Cox for seeking access to secret White
House tapes of the president’s conversations. The Supreme Court
eventually forced Nixon to turn over the tapes, which contained evidence
pointing to his involvement in the cover-up of the Watergate burglary
and led to his resignation in August 1974.
Times Reporters Decode the Trump-Comey Saga
The New York Times reporters Peter
Baker, Maggie Haberman and Matthew Rosenberg analyze the firing of the
F.B.I. director, James B. Comey.
By A.J. CHAVAR on Publish Date May 11, 2017.
.
Watch in Times Video »
The
difference, according to Luke A. Nichter, a historian at Texas A&M
University who has specialized in the Nixon tapes, is that “Nixon’s
rantings were done in private, on his tapes,” and he did not cancel
press briefings.
“The
reason I have a hard time with the label Nixonian is that we’ve
surpassed it,” Mr. Nichter said. “To be Trumpian is something of a
greater magnitude than simply being Nixonian.”
Mr.
Trump’s defenders have said that Watergate comparisons are overwrought
and that there is no evidence of collusion between Mr. Trump’s campaign
and Russia during last year’s election. American intelligence agencies
have concluded that Russia tried to meddle in the campaign with the aim
of tilting the election to Mr. Trump.
The
president has said that 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 R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national
intelligence, has testified that he knew of no collusion. Mr. Clapper
left office on Jan. 20 with the end of President Barack Obama’s
administration and has not been involved in the investigation since
then.
“When
James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of
the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?” Mr. Trump asked.
Lawmakers
have given conflicting and vague assessments of the evidence so far. A
couple of Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee, Representatives
Adam B. Schiff and Eric Swalwell of California, have said there is at
least some evidence of collusion, but when Senator Dianne Feinstein of
California, a Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was asked
last week if there was, she said, “Not at this time.”
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