CHRIS WALLACE (HOST): On Friday, as you mentioned, after the president and Comey associates disagreed about what was and wasn't discussed at the dinner they held one week after the inauguration, Mr. Trump sent out this tweet “James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press.”
[...]
WALLACE: Let me ask you, what's your reaction to what clearly is a possibility, certainly not denied by this White House, that the president has installed recording devices in the White House?
SEN. MARK WARNER (D-VA): I am by no means a legal expert, but this sure seems to have reverberations of past history. When we've seen presidents who secretly tape, that usually does not end up being a good outcome for a president.
WALLACE: How does the Senate find out whether he's just trolling you, and if there are indeed tapes how do you get them?
WARNER: Well, first of, listen to what you just said. How do we know if the president is simply trolling us? The whole notion that the president can throw out these kind of claims and then not either confirm or deny them is outrageous in my mind. And if there is the existence of tapes I want to make sure, one, they are preserved, and are not mysteriously destroyed in the coming days, and then two, one way or the other, Congress will have to get a look at those tapes.
WALLACE: Julie, I have to say it took my breath away when I heard that. What you make of that, do you think the president is just trolling the media and his critics? Do you think there's a real possibility that he has set up a taping system?
JULIE PACE: Well, I think it's important to note that with President Trump, when he was in business and when he was a candidate, people who worked for him largely assumed that their conversations with him were being taped, in his New York offices, people generally worked under that assumption. So the idea that he would be taping conversations is not out of the realm of possibility. Of course, it's much different when you're talking about conversations in the Oval Office, particularly if they are being recorded secretly. But the mere fact that we're having this conversation is really extraordinary. And you have to put it, again, in some context. This is a president who was extremely frustrated with the way that the rollout of Comey's firing was handled. He felt like he needed to step in there, he needed to be his own spokesperson. But in doing so both in the interviews that he did and in his tweets, he only created more headaches, and potentially legal headaches for his White House.
Previously:
How Fox News Covered Trump Firing The FBI Director, In 51 Screen Shots
Trump Lied About Why He Fired Comey, And Right-Wing Media Helped Him Sell It
On MSNBC, Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Says Trump Firing Comey Could Indicate A “Potential Obstruction Of Justice”
This clip has been updated to include an additional example
