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.
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And according to journalist Yashar Ali, the “Oval Office still has recording capability”:
https://twitter.com/yashar/status/863022616298258432
Over to you, Ben. Maybe the anger at Donald Trump is a little over the top?
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