President Trump Threatens James Comey, Floats Canceling Press Briefings

WASHINGTON, DC — President Trump unleashed a series of furious tweets Friday morning in which he suggested he may have damning tape recordings of former FBI Director James Comey and raised the possibility of canceling all future press briefings.

"As a very active President with lots of things happening, it is not possible for my surrogates to stand at podium with perfect accuracy!...." he wrote in an early morning tweet. "...Maybe the best thing to do would be to cancel all future "press briefings" and hand out written responses for the sake of accuracy???"

Trump has reportedly been furious over the fallout from his firing of Comey, blaming his spokespeople for being slow to take to the airwaves and unprepared to defend his decision. If any messaging strategy had been in place for the hours after the firing was announced, the plan was an utter failure.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders first said that Trump's decision to fire Comey was based on the recommendation of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Vice President Mike Pence and Press Secretary Sean Spicer said the same. Trump himself said Tuesday in his letter terminating Comey that he had “accepted their recommendation.”

After Rosenstein objected to taking responsibility, though, the White House on Wednesday tweaked its account of the firing, saying that Trump had been “strongly inclined to remove” Comey for weeks, and made his final decision based on the recommendations.

That explanation had a short shelf-life, too.

On Thursday, Trump said in an interview with NBC'sLester Holt that he had already made the decision on Comey's fate long before requesting Rosenstein's opinion on the matter. (Rosenstein's memo never directly recommended firing Comey.)

“I was going to fire Comey — my decision,” Trump told Holt, contradicting the narrative spun by his staff and vice president. “I was going to fire regardless of recommendation.”

The president's surrogates had been adamant that Comey got the ax because of his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails and that firing him had nothing to do with the FBI's investigation into Trump administration ties to Russia.

Trump then defended Comey's firing in part by referencing that very investigation, directly contradicting the initial explanation given by his staff and himself.

“And in fact, when I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, ‘You know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story,’” Mr. Trump told Holt. “It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”

His tweets Friday indicated he remains frustrated.

"Again, the story that there was collusion between the Russians & Trump campaign was fabricated by Dems as an excuse for losing the election," Trump tweeted. "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"

Whether the threat directed at Comey was bluster or not is unknown but raising the possibility of secret tapes was striking in its similarities to the tweet storm Trump unleashed when he accused President Obama of wiretapping him.

The threat also did nothing to silence the Trump critics who have been comparing his firing of Comey to Richard Nixon's order to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. Nixon's order came after Cox subpoenaed him for secret White House tapes. (Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy, William Ruckelshaus, refused to fire Cox and resigned instead. Solicitor General Robert H. Bork fired Cox.)

“Not since Watergate have our legal systems been so threatened and our faith in the independence and integrity of those systems so shaken,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut.

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