James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 12, 2017
The Washington Post described this tweet as “an apparent attempt to threaten Comey,” while NBC News calls it “a stern warning.”
Trump’s intended insinuation would seem to be that the revelations from such “tapes” would show that Comey was lying.
But just a minute: this purported “threat” is coming from a man who has repeatedly insisted that he was a victim of wiretapping and who was publicly humiliated by Comey saying categorically that Trump’s belief was baseless.
In Trump World, if his conversations with Comey got taped, they got taped by Comey.
If he learned nothing else from Nixon, Trump surely learned that it’s never a good idea to gather evidence of ones misdeeds by keeping secret recordings of private conversations.
Moreover, Trump can hardly have forgotten that unwittingly being taped very nearly cost him the presidential election.
Trump’s early morning tweet might have been delivered in the form of a threat but what it really represents is a projection of his fears.
“James Comey better hope that there are no "tapes" of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”
Translation:
“Donald Trump now hopes the FBI didn’t tape his conversations with Comey, because if they were leaked, they would expose how Trump just lied on NBC.”
CNN now reports that as far as Comey is concerned, “if there is a tape, there’s nothing he is worried about,” — which is to say, nothing that Comey is worried about.
And that’s probably got Trump even more worried: Comey just left open the possibility that such a tape exists!
And maybe it does — and surely this is the stuff of Trump’s nightmares.
