How "Nixonian". Propagandist author.
Posted on 06/10/2017 6:38:25 AM PDT by rktman
There is almost universal bewilderment over President Trump raising the possibility that his conversations with James Comey were captured by a recording system he had installed in the White House. Memories immediately turn to the experience of President Nixon with White House tapes being subpoenaed. That did not end well for Nixon, and raising the possibility that Trump White House conversations could be subject to subpoenas – perhaps from a Democrat-controlled House of Representatives in 2019 – has both friends and foes of the president scratching their heads.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
I think you are on target. Possible that Trump has found a bug left behind by the Obama people, too. Which revelation would be explosive, indeed. He’s keeping it as a hole card and letting the scum from highest to lowest know, he has the goods.
“Of course, President Trump lied when he said the conversations were taped when they were actually recorded.”
That’s the impeachable offense. Further aided by Trump’s claim he had a Xerox copy of the transcript when indeed it was made on a Sharp copier.
House of Cards, Season 5, episode 9, 10, shows exactly how every conversation and action in the WH is /or can use such a monitoring system.
My take: There are no tapes. Trump put that possibility out there to ensure that Comey stayed within the guardrails and come clean on major points. Comey had to be careful not to lie or exaggerate too much given the possibility of actual tapes or recordings of his conversations with the President that would be embarrassing to Comey.
Trump will announce soon that there are no tapes. Then it becomes he said, he said. Comey overplayed his hand by leaking information of the conversations to the MSM before and after Trump's tweet. Big question: Why didn't Trump deal directly with the NYT rather than using a cutout? He could have been the anonymous source rather than using his friend.
Then the President should make some tapes, good one-liner jokes at the expense of his enemies, and embarrassing facts that they would rather not have revealed, and then just release them to the public.
How "Nixonian". Propagandist author.
By Comey's sworn testimony, it was the determinative factor behind one leak. Comey himself asserted that but for the tweet, "Trump told me to drop Flynn investigation" would not have leaked.
No, Trump doesn’t have some stupid recording system that recorded everything like Nixon had. He could have simply selectively used a tiny microphone at his meetings with the criminal comey. As long as he’s in a one party consent jurisdiction, it’s no problem. I don’t think that being President prohibits this action and certainly it wouldn’t be an issue before he was sworn in. Trump is the type of guy to do this.
Now the criminal Comey couldn’t use a wire against Trump unless he was authorized to do so in an investigation.
During the Clinton impeachment mess, there was a call for the NSA/Secret Service to produce any video or audio recordings of Bubba and Monica. The call quickly died down for some unknown reason.
If you recall, Bubba and Monica retreated to a small kitchenette for their deeds, supposedly because that was the only area out of the video recording field of view.
No one but President Trump knows for sure but it is fun to speculate. Here is mine:
From the day he was elected, Mr Trump has been subject to sabotage by leak. At one time early on he mentioned something about planting different versions of a story and following them to the source. I speculate that he became suspicious that Comey was leaking and insisted on having the private meeting to find out for sure. In that meeting, he told Comey something that no one else knew and waited to read it in the paper. When it showed up, his suspicion was confirmed. He then set the private dinner, played Comey liked a fiddle and had the conversation recorded
The next step was to fire him in a manner that would cause Comey and his supporters to react in a non rational manner. He used Comer’s arrogance and eago to force him to go on the record under oath. Something about loyalty was said during the dinner but not the way Comey testified. When President Trump told the reporter that they would be disappointed about the tape issue, he was referring to their desire to see him proven wrong.
I would predict that a tape of the private dinner will be shown and it will be the only tape. That will be sufficient to prove Comey guilty of perjury and the existence of a conspiracy
January 6 Briefing
I first met then-President-Elect Trump on Friday, January 6 in a conference room at Trump Tower in New York. I was there with other Intelligence Community (IC) leaders to brief him and his new national security team on the findings of an IC assessment concerning Russian efforts to interfere in the election. At the conclusion of that briefing, I remained alone with the President-Elect to brief him on some personally sensitive aspects of the information assembled during the assessment.
The IC leadership thought it important, for a variety of reasons, to alert the incoming President to the existence of this material, even though it was salacious and unverified. Among those reasons were: (1) we knew the media was about to publicly report the material and we believed the IC should not keep knowledge of the material and its imminent release from the President-Elect; and (2) to the extent there was some effort to compromise an incoming President, we could blunt any such effort with a defensive briefing.
The Director of National Intelligence asked that I personally do this portion of the briefing because I was staying in my position and because the material implicated the FBI’s counter-intelligence responsibilities. We also agreed I would do it alone to minimize potential embarrassment to the President-Elect. Although we agreed it made sense for me to do the briefing, the FBI’s leadership and I were concerned that the briefing might create a situation where a new President came into office uncertain about whether the FBI was conducting a counter-intelligence investigation of his personal conduct.
I'd give the "Glomar response." Neither confirm or deny. Even denial gives away information that is useful. Why would Trump want the world to know he was bluffing? There is a reason the last man standing doesn't have to show his cards, unless met and called.
Because he is not teasing!!
Why didn’t Trump deal directly with the NYT rather than using a cutout? He could have been the anonymous source rather than using his friend. Substitute Comey for Trump.
Or just another step in the process of decisionmaking.
Notice how every narrative begins with Comey the good guy, and Trump the suspect? What if that assumption is reversed. How does the story play? What if Trump is working a sting on Comey?
Not to steal your thunder, that's just how I take the thrust of your comment.
The Art of the Deal
Which is why, I hope DJT’s first order was an atomic level scan of the entire WH including the residence to discover and disable the hidden embedded bugs left from the previous administration.
Sniff is too dumb to realize that the tweet was not about taping BY Trump, but illegal taping OF Trump, who was tweaking Comey’s nose for vehemently denying the FBI was spying on him. The report that the FBI had “wiretapped” Trump Tower, and by implication Trump and his campaign, first appeared in the NYT, based on anonymous leakers. The NYT is Comey’s own go-to leak buddy; ain’t that interesting.
The Committee needs to have a professional depose Comey under oath, in private, about all his leak operations since becoming FBI Director; the conduct of the Hillary server investigation by the DoJ and Lynch; the unmasking operation; his communications and coordination with the “Intel Community”, Clintonistas, and DNC about Trump, etc.
First, he wasn't bluffing. He said he hoped that no tapes were available. He never said he had tapes or recordings.
Second, he must state that there are no tapes. Otherwise, he must deal with this: Congressional investigators demanded Friday that the president turn over within two weeks any recordings he made of his conversations with former FBI director James B. Comey, as President Trump refused to answer questions about whether such recordings exist.
Comey asked to meet with President-Elect Trump on January 6th at Trump Tower.
Comey asked everyone to leave the room and told Trump about the fake dossier which McCain hand delivered to Comey. McCain’s surrogate flew all the way to England to pick up a hard copy of the dossier. (So much corruption for creating this fake story about Trump in a Russian hotel room, and Comey and McCain were so inept that they believed it, or knew it was fake but assisted in planting the story in order to take down Trump)
Part of Comey’s written statement:
I was there with other Intelligence Community (IC) leaders to brief him and his new national security team on the findings of an IC assessment concerning Russian efforts to interfere in the election. At the conclusion of that briefing, I remained alone with the PresidentElect to brief him on some personally sensitive aspects of the information assembled during the assessment…
The Director of National Intelligence asked that I personally do this portion of the briefing because I was staying in my position and because the material implicated the FBI’s counter-intelligence responsibilities. We also agreed I would do it alone to minimize potential embarrassment to the President-Elect. …
[P]rior to the January 6 meeting, I discussed with the FBI’s leadership team whether I should be prepared to assure President-Elect Trump that we were not investigating him personally. That was true; we did not have an open counter-intelligence case on him. We agreed I should do so if circumstances warranted. During our one-on-one meeting at Trump Tower, based on PresidentElect Trump’s reaction to the briefing and without him directly asking the question, I offered that assurance.
But Trump wouldn’t have assumed that of Comey. Trump might have assumed that a powerful guy coming to meet with him, dismissing a bunch of other powerful people from the room, and revealing he has intelligence about some really salacious, potentially embarrassing personal allegations against the president-Elect was sending a bit of a Tony Soprano message of his own. At the very least, Trump may have reasonably assumed that in the future, when he wanted to discuss the ongoing Russia investigation and ask about whether he was under investigation, he should do that alone with Comey, as Comey had illustrated that’s exactly how he does that exact thing.
https://thefederalist.com/2017/06/08/comey-the-first-to-call-a-private-meeting-with-trump/
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.