House Intel leader demands Donald Trump turn over secret tapes of FBI Director James Comey

| 8:50 pm EDT May 12, 2017
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Donald Trump may have tripped himself up this morning when he used his infamous Twitter account to launch a public threat in the direction of recently fired FBI Director James Comey. Trump was trying to intimidate Comey into keeping quiet about whatever he knows. But in the process, Trump appeared to admit that he or his allies have been secretly recording his conversations with Comey all along.

Trump has since admitted in a television interview with Lester Holt that he fired Comey to try to bring an end to the FBI’s investigation of the Trump-Russia scandal. But now the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, Congressman Adam Schiff, is demanding that Donald Trump turn over any such tapes as evidence in the committee’s own investigation into the same scandal. This sets up a catch-22 from which Trump won’t be able to easily free himself.

Now that Trump has asserted he or his allies have such recordings of James Comey, there’s no way for him to turn around and prove that no such tapes exist. And if he does have such tapes, he’s not going to risk incriminating himself by turning them over. So whether these secret tapes of Comey exist or not, there’s no way for Trump make this go away.

Congressional leaders like Adam Schiff will continue to demand at every opportunity that Donald Trump either turn over his tapes of Comey, or admit that he’d been lying about the tapes. The general public, and the more on-the-ball news outlets, will continue to do the same. This also leaves Trump trapped with the optics of having claimed that he, like Richard Nixon, was secretly taping White House meetings. Those tapes are ultimately part of what did Nixon in – and now Trump is stuck being seen as having done the same thing. Help fund Palmer Report