The threats that Donald Trump made about recording a dinner with former FBI Director James Comey seem a little more real when you dig back into stories from last year.
The presumptive Republican nominee “had a telephone console installed in his bedroom that acted like a switchboard, connecting to every phone extension on the estate,” the report says, citing six ex-workers.
The idea that any kind of communication is private, even from Trump, seems foreign to him. In February, he helpfully allowed the CEO of a defense contractor to listen in on a call to an Air Force general without making the general aware.
Days before taking office, President-elect Donald Trump made two surprise calls to the Air Force general managing the Pentagon’s largest weapons program, the Lockheed Martin Corp. F-35 jet.
Listening in on one of those calls was Dennis Muilenburg -- the CEO of Lockheed’s chief rival, Boeing Co.
And it’s not just phone calls. Trump has a long history of pulling out the recorder.
Throughout Donald Trump’s business career, some executives who came to work for him were taken aside by colleagues and warned to assume that their discussions with the boss were being recorded. …
Sean Spicer refuses to say whether Trump actually did capture recordings of either the dinner Trump strong-armed Comey into attending, or the phone calls between the White House and the Hoover Building. But one thing is clear—if recordings exist, they are subject to being subpoenaed and destroying them would be a crime.
Assuming that Trump did record Comey, the one who needs to be worried might be Trump.
A post-Watergate reform measure, the Presidential Records Act of 1978, requires presidents to preserve and archive recordings made in the White House. The act is built on the 1974 U.S. Supreme Court decision that led to Nixon’s resignation. The justices unanimously ruled that the president could not claim “executive privilege” against a subpoena seeking audiotapes made in the Oval Office.
Trump seems to think Comey said something that contradicts his statements in public, but then, Trump also doesn't have a great memory for conversations.
A Democratic lawmaker denied Thursday that he told President Donald Trump he "will go down as one of the great presidents in the history of our country," disputing the President's version of a conversation between the two.
Including conversations with Comey.
Comey associates said he was wary of private meetings and discussions with the president and did not offer the assurance, as Trump has claimed, that Trump was not under investigation as part of the probe into Russian interference in last year’s presidential election.
So sure, Donald. Bring on the “tapes.” It's easy to see why Trump believed that President Obama was “wiretapping” him, because in the same situation, Trump would not hesitate.