WASHINGTON _ President Donald Trump chose the day that secretive Senate Republicans released their much-anticipated health care bill to finally end some suspense of his own making: No, he hasn't been surreptitiously recording conversations in the White House.
In Twitter messages posted just before a scheduled White House news briefing Thursday, the president did not entirely rule out the possibility that recordings of his private conversations _ with fired FBI Director James B. Comey or anyone else _ exist.
But, he wrote, "I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings."
It was Trump who first suggested more than a month ago that he might have recordings. As he feuded publicly with Comey in the days after firing him May 9, Trump warned in a tweet: "James Comey better hope that there are no 'tapes' of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!"
That tweet apparently backfired on the president. Comey has said he decided then to divulge his own contemporaneous notes of private meetings with Trump, in the hope _ subsequently realized _ that the Justice Department would name a special counsel to probe possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign, and including whether the president sought to obstruct justice by urging Comey to end the FBI investigations into that and related matters.
The White House has refused to confirm or deny that Trump had been recording his conversations. And when Trump himself was asked about it at a news conference this month, he promised to answer the question at a time of his choosing. Reporters wouldn't like the answer, he added mysteriously.
Trump has shown an uncanny ability to redirect media attention away from unflattering subjects onto other matters, even if they are hardly favorable to him.
The acting Republican chairman and senior Democrat in charge of the House Intelligence Committee's Russia investigation had given the White House a June 23 deadline to produce any recordings that might exist of Trump's conversations with Comey.
