"James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press." Oh, Donald, if you weren't so abundantly dull witted and uninformed you would know that your loosely veiled "threat" is totally hollow, not to mention specious and makeweight -- just like you in general.
If the White House Has Secret Recordings, Destroying Them May Be a Crime, according to Mother Jones Magazine.
During a press briefing on Friday afternoon, White House press secretary Sean Spicer declined to answer questions about whether Trump had a secret White House recording system. The good news for historians is that if such tapes do exist, the Trump administration is required by law to preserve these presidential records and turn them over to the National Archives and Records Administration.
On Friday Reps. John Conyers and Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, respectively, sent the White House a letter demanding it turn over any tapes relating to Comey.
A spokesman for NARA forwarded requests for comment on the preservation of Trump's tapes, if they exist, to the White House, which did not respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones. But Lisa Rosenberg, executive director of Open the Government, a coalition of good-government and watchdog groups, says the the rules are clear: Under the Presidential Records Act, recordings between the president and a senior government official that occur in the White House are not private recordings; they are presidential records that will eventually be released to the public. (An administration can delay the public release of materials for up to 12 years after the president leaves office.)
"We're not just talking about who he's having dinner with, we're talking about information that impacts decision-making that impacts public policy, and in this case it might impact national security and integrity of the elections," she says. "Even though we might not know what will be said for 12 years, we can still learn from that. We're still learning from past administrations about any number of issues that continue to resonate to this day. We need to be able to learn from our mistakes, and our successes, so it's in the public interest. That's why the Presidential Records Act exists."
Rosenberg went on to say that there was no real mechanism to make sure that the White House is in fact preserving the tapes as records for release at a future date. The Presidential Records Act doesn't have an enforcement clause per se, but there are other legal reasons that a president would have for preserving such records. Richard Nixon, for example, found out the hard way that he was not in fact the owner of the clandestine tapes of meetings and telephone calls which he kept while in the White House. Mother Jones continues:
For example, they could be subpoenaed by congressional or FBI investigators probing the Russia scandal or other matters. (President Richard Nixon, who famously recorded his Oval Office meetings and calls, refused to respond to a subpoena for secret recordings of his Oval Office meetings—a refusal that eventually led to one of the articles of impeachment that were drawn up against him.)
“Given the current circumstances, the destruction of such tapes would raise serious obstruction of justice issues,” Norm Eisen, an ethics lawyer during the Obama administration said. Eisen also said that the existence of recordings means that they can be targeted for subpoena by Congress and that White House officials should be aware of the need to save tapes that have been made.
There's an old saying, "The more things change the more they are the same." Here we are, once again, revisiting the hot spots of the early '70's in Washington and obsessing on presidential tape recordings. Richard Nixon was a crook and a liar but at least when he spoke of something it had some tangible reality. In Trumpistan -- who knows what's real and what's not, what's hidden and what's not, and most importantly, what Trump thinks might be real and/or hidden, because Trump's grasp of reality on a good day seems tenuous at best.