QUESTION for Ben Rhodes: How many Oval Office conversations did Obama tape?

Greg P. | 6:46 PM on May 12, 2017

As we are debating whether or not there are, in the president’s words, “tapes” of his dinner with FBI Director James Comey, there’s another question we should be asking: Did President Obama tape all of his meeting in the Oval Office?

The Washington Post reports:

Wait a minute … Did Barack Obama record his Oval Office conversations? https://t.co/NNcUiehRAs

— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) May 12, 2017

Money quote where former White House staffer Ben Rhodes told author Mark Bowden — whose tape recorder died during his interview of Obama — “Ah don’t worry about it. We record everything in here. We’ll get you a trasncript before you leave.”

In 2012, journalist Mark Bowden gave a talk at the Pritzker Military Museum in Chicago about his new book, “The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden.” As part of the research for that book, Bowden spent 90 minutes interviewing President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. The interview went well — until it didn’t.

Bowden:

“As I stood up to say goodbye to the president, I looked down and my tape recorder had died. … That thing had always worked like a charm but there it was, just as dead as a nut on the table. So I said my goodbyes and as I was walking out of the Oval Office with Ben Rhodes, I said, ‘Ben, you’re not going to believe this, but my recorder died in the middle of that somewhere.’”

“‘Ah don’t worry about it,’ he says, ‘we record everything in here. We’ll get you a transcript before you leave.’ And he did.”

That anecdote speaks volumes about the subject at hand: A recorded, transcribed conversation that was conducted without the subject knowing.