Donald Trump has issued an astonishing apparent threat to James Comey, implying recordings of the pair's conversations could be released if the FBI director he fired "starts leaking to
the press".
The last in a series of early-morning tweets, the President said: "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"
Hours before, reports had surfaced of a post-inauguration meeting in which Trump demanded the FBI director's loyalty – which Comey denied. The president made his demands in a one-on-one dinner meeting at the White House, associates of Comey told The New York Times. The associates felt comfortable releasing the details of this meeting after Comey was dismissed from his position on Tuesday. Rank-and-file members of the FBI are reported to be upset by the unexpected firing.
Trump, in his first interview after the firing, described the dinner meeting differently. The president told NBC's Lester Holt that Comey used the meeting to request to keep his job as FBI director – a 10-year appointment of which he had served four years. Trump said Comey also reassured him during that meeting that he was not under investigation by the FBI. The tweets followed previous posts in which he complained about what he described as "fake news", before making an unprecedented threat to cancel all future White House press briefings and only issue written statements. Trump followed his apparent warning to Comey with another tweet referring to former national intelligence chief, James Clapper.
"When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?" he said.
Clapper, however, qualified his remarks by saying he had been unaware of an FBI investigation into the matter until Comey announced it to the public at a House hearing in March. And it's unclear how much Clapper would know about developments in the investigation after he left office earlier this year.
It's not unheard of for presidents to record conversations, using different systems to do so, with and without participants' knowledge. Six presidents secretly recorded meetings and telephone conversations between 1940 and 1973, according to historian and CNN contributor Julian Zelizer.
US Prez admits Russia probe was factor in firing Comey
Donald Trump has said he was thinking of "this Russia thing" when he decided James Comey's fate – contradicting the White House rationale that he fired the FBI director for mishandling the Clinton email investigation.
Comey had been leading an investigation into possible collusion between Trump advisers and Russian officials when he was dismissed by the president. Defending that decision in an interview on NBC News on Thursday, Trump said: "And, 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've won.'"
Trump also said there were three occasions on which Comey assured him he was not under investigation. The president said he called the director of the FBI to ask for an update on a possible criminal investigation into his ties with Russia.