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.
“There was never any sense with Donald of the phone being used for private conversation,” said John O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in the 1980s.
For O’Donnell and others who have had regular dealings with Trump through the years, there was something viscerally real about the threat implied by the president’s tweet Friday morning warning that fired FBI director James B. Comey “better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
“Talking on the phone with Donald was a public experience,” said O’Donnell, author of a book about his former boss, “Trumped: The Inside Story of the Real Donald Trump.” “You never knew who else was listening.”
The president’s tweet remained something of a puzzle Friday, as White House press secretary Sean Spicer rebuffed questions about whether Trump had indeed recorded the three conversations in which he says Comey assured him that the president was not under investigation.
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Two House Democrats on Friday sent a letter to White House counsel Donald F. McGahn, seeking the release of any tapes or other communications between Trump and Comey. Trump’s tweet raised “the specter of possible intimidation and obstruction of justice,” wrote Reps. John Conyers Jr. (Mich.) and Elijah E. Cummings (Md.). “Under normal circumstances, we would not consider credible any claims that the White House may have taped conversations of meetings with the president. However, because of the many false statements made by White House officials this week, we are compelled to ask whether any such recordings do in fact exist.”
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Trump’s warning tweet to Comey appeared to be a response to a New York Times report that said Trump had twice asked the FBI director at a White House dinner for the two men if he would promise the president his loyalty. Comey reportedly said that he would offer the president only his honesty.
Trump’s fascination with recording his conversations reaches back to the early years of his real estate career, when he installed in his 26th-story office in Trump Tower a “system for surreptitiously tape recording business meetings,” according to an eyewitness account in Harry Hurt’s 1993 biography, “Lost Tycoon.” And BuzzFeed News reported last year that Trump listened in on calls made by staff at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
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WaPo: Trump has a long history of secretly recording calls, according to former associates https://t.co/NkSw6ZnkGr
— Jake Tapper (@jaketapper) May 13, 2017
Then since 20 Jan he's been creating lots of Federal records which Congress should subpoena immediately. https://t.co/iDJCaMKu7d
— John Schindler (@20committee) May 13, 2017
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