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White House refuses to deny Trump has recording devices and this is nothing like Nixon, not at all

"The president has nothing further to add on that."

Sasha Lekach

on May 12, 2017

Donald Trump just can't help himself. He has to tweet. But then his tweets get him in trouble -- like Richard Nixon-level trouble.

Trump started Friday off with a tweetstorm that included this threat-like tweet directed at fired FBI director James Comey. That opened a whole new can of worms, specifically whether Trump secretly records things in the White House.

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This of course was brought up at Friday's press briefing, which saw the return of Sean Spicer, after he took a few days off from hiding "among" the bushes. Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason asked first about the president recording the Comey conversation, but followed up with the logical query, "Are there recording devices in the Oval Office or in the residence?"

Spicer responded: "The president has nothing further to add on that."

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It was the denial heard round the Twitterverse, which was reminded yet again of a certain previous president who got mixed up in secret recordings back in the 1970s. Nixon wasn't the first president to record conversations in the White House, but the tapes were integral to his impeachment in the wake of Watergate.

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Others ran with the dark humor and scary similarities to history based on the newly-feasible possibility of secret recordings from Trump's White House.

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Even WikiLeaks wants in on the secret "tapes," which gives us a weird look at how the Nixon scandal may have played out had it happened in the age of social media and the internet.

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Trump's initial tweet about the Comey "tapes" was just missing the #FlashbackFriday hashtag to give it that Nixonian flavor.

Topics Donald Trump

Sasha Lekach

Sasha is a news writer at Mashable's San Francisco office. She's an SF native who went to UC Davis and later received her master's from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She's been reporting out of her hometown over the years at Bay City News (news wire), SFGate (the San Francisco Chronicle website), and even made it out of California to write for the Chicago Tribune. She's been described as a bookworm and a gym rat.