Trump Warns Comey: Better Hope There Are No ‘Tapes’ of Talks

President Donald Trump, in a warning to his fired FBI director, tweeted Friday: “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Trump’s tweet came the morning after he asserted Comey had told him three times that he wasn’t under FBI investigation. “I said, ‘If it’s possible, would you let me know, am I under investigation?’ He said, ‘You are not under investigation,’ ” Trump said in an interview Thursday with NBC News. He said the discussions happened in two phone calls and at a dinner in which Comey was asking to keep his job.

Comey has not confirmed Trump’s account. Late Thursday, The New York Times cited two unnamed Comey associates who recounted his version of a January dinner with the president in which Trump asked for a pledge of loyalty. Comey declined, instead offering “honest.” When Trump then pressed for “honest loyalty,” Comey told him, “You will have that,” the associates said.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders disputed the report and said the president would “never even suggest the expectation of personal loyalty.” Officials did not immediately respond to questions about whether Trump recorded his discussions with the FBI director.

The president’s morning Twitter comments again raised the specter of Richard Nixon, whose secretly taped conversations and telephone calls in the White House ultimately led to his downfall in the Watergate scandal. Trump’s firing of Comey already has made him the first president since Nixon to fire a law-enforcement official overseeing an investigation tied to the White House.

Meanwhile, the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said Friday that Trump was “dangerous” and that “his credibility has been destroyed.”

Durbin, while on MSNBC, suggested that the president’s move to fire Comey amid an investigation of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election and possible ties to Trump’s own campaign was “dangerous because he may be obstructing justice.” And he said he feared the world would no longer take Trump at his word.

Even before Trump’s tweet, the White House was scrambling to clarify why Comey was fired. Trump told NBC he had planned to fire Comey all along, regardless of whether top Justice Department officials recommended the stunning step.

The White House initially cited a Justice Department memo criticizing Comey’s handling of last year’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails as the impetus for Trump’s decision. But Trump on Thursday acknowledged for the first time that the Russia investigation – which he dismissed as a “made-up story” – was also on his mind as he ousted the man overseeing the probe.

The shifting accounts of the decision to fire Comey, whom Trump derided as a “showboat” and “grandstander,” added to a mounting sense of uncertainty and chaos in the West Wing, as aides scrambled to get their stories straight and appease an angry president. Not even Vice President Mike Pence was spared the embarrassment of having told a version of events that was later contradicted by Trump.

On Capitol Hill Thursday, acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe strongly disputed the White House’s assertion that Comey had been fired in part because he had lost the confidence of the FBI’s rank-and-file.

“That is not accurate,” McCabe said. “Director Comey enjoyed broad support within the FBI and still does to this day.”

Sanders insisted that she had heard from “countless” members of the FBI who welcomed the president’s decision.

Regarding Trump’s version of his conversations with Comey, McCabe told a Senate panel that it was not “standard practice” to tell an individual whether they are or are not under investigation.

The ousted director himself is said to be confident that his own version of events will come out, possibly in an appearance before Congress, according to an associate who has been in touch with him since his firing Tuesday.

White House officials and others insisted on anonymity in order to disclose private conversations and internal deliberations.

Trump and Comey’s relationship was strained early on, in part because of the president’s claims that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. Comey found the allegations confounding, according to his associate, and wondered what to make of what he described as strange thoughts coming from his new boss.

The president was no kinder to Comey on Thursday, calling him names and saying he’d left the FBI in “virtual turmoil.” He said that while he received a scathing assessment of Comey’s performance from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein on Monday, that memo was not a catalyst for his dramatic decision as the White House had said earlier.

“I was going to fire Comey,” Trump said. “Regardless of recommendation I was going to fire Comey.”

That’s far different from the White House’s initial account in the hours after Comey’s firing. Multiple officials, including Pence, said the president was acting at the behest of Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

But it quickly became clear that the president had been stewing for days over the Russia investigation and Comey’s refusal to defend him in appearances before lawmakers. By Wednesday afternoon, the officials, like Trump, were saying he had in fact been considering ousting the FBI director for months because of a lack of confidence in his ability to lead the agency.

And the Russia investigation was still on his mind.

“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,” he said.

Sanders attributed the disconnect in the week’s explanations to the fact that she had not directly asked Trump when he’d made the decision to fire Comey until shortly before Thursday’s press briefing.

On Friday morning, Trump tweeted: “As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy! … Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future “press briefings” and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???”

Then, in a tweet referring to comments made by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that he has no knowledge of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, Trump wrote: “When James Clapper himself, and virtually everyone else with knowledge of the witch hunt, says there is no collusion, when does it end?”

The White House said Trump is weighing options for replacing Comey, a decision that could have broad implications for the future of the Russia investigation. Some senior officials have discussed nominating Rep. Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who ran the House committee that investigated Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s actions in connection with the 2012 attack on a U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya.

Trump’s advisers have repeatedly tried to downplay the Russia-election matter, with Sanders saying Wednesday the FBI was “doing a whole lot more than the Russia investigation.”

But McCabe characterized the investigation as “highly significant” and assured senators that Comey’s firing would not hinder it. He promised that he would tolerate no interference from the White House and would not provide the administration with updates on its progress.

“You cannot stop the men and women of the FBI from doing the right thing,” he declared. He said that there has been no interference so far.