On Thursday, Donald Trump answered a question regarding his conversation with former FBI Director James Comey, a question which, in retrospect, he should not have baited.

In late May, after firing Comey, Trump wrote, “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes’ of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” That was a shot across Comey’s bow ahead of his illegal release to The New York Times the contents of official memos he “recorded” about his conversation with Trump. Comey leaked those memos a few hours after Trump’s remark, which the administration anticipated.

In Comey’s Senate testimony earlier this month, which we detailed in “Comey v. Trump: Obstructing the Truth,” he offered a very convoluted explanation for leaking his official FBI record of their conversation to the press, suggesting it was Trump’s remark a few hours before that leak which prompted him to do so. However, Comey had, clearly, already determined he was going to leak those documents, and affirmed in his Senate testimony, “I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” (And some suggest Comey is not “political”?) In effect, Comey indicted himself.

Newt Gingrich offered this assessment of the original tape tweet: “I think [Trump] was in his way instinctively trying to rattle Comey. He’s not a professional politician. He doesn’t come back and think about Nixon and Watergate. His instinct is: ‘I’ll out-bluff you.’”

Well, the bluff failed, and in our repeated assessment, Trump (and whoever is vetting his social media posts), needs a cease and desist order to stop the self-inflicted unforced errors, which are fueling the Demo/MSM propaganda machine’s successful efforts to derail the Republican agenda.

On Thursday, Trump answered the Comey tape question he baited, writing, “With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings.”

Of course, that follow-up has set all the MSM talkingheads’ hair on fire. But the screeching and screaming aside, it’s not a difficult path to interpret Trump’s original tape-bait comment in the context of his follow-up remark, given that, indeed, it was issued amid “all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information.” Ask yourself, based on all of the felonious leaks by Barack Obama’s deep state holdovers in the last six months, do you think it possible that Trump’s conversation with Comey was recorded by a “third party”?