We now have a partial answer on whether there are tapes of President Donald Trump's conversations inside the White House, at least as far as the Secret Service is concerned.
The Secret Service said Monday it doesn't have any tapes of Trump's conversations within the White House.
When past presidents like Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy were in office, the Secret Service was in charge of maintaining their taped conversations.
But The Wall Street Journal asked the Secret Service for whatever recordings it has under the Freedom of Information Act. The agency got back to the paper and said it has nothing to give.
That doesn't mean we're out of the woods on this, though. There could still be other agencies or sources of those recordings.
Trump seems to want folks to think there are recordings. He hinted on Twitter that tapes might exist after details of his conversations with fired FBI Director James Comey leaked to the media.
The New York Times had just published an account of a one-on-one dinner between Comey and the president. Comey maintains the president asked him, in that dinner, for his loyalty.
"He asked specifically of loyalty in the context of asking me to stay," Comey told the Senate intelligence committee. "My common sense told me, 'What's going on here is that he's looking to get something in exchange for granting my request to stay in the job.'"
Trump and Comey met again in February. In that meeting, Comey said the president asked him to let the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn go. Comey wrote down his version of events in a memo. A few months later, Comey got fired, and the president got on his Twitter account.
Comey told the Senate intelligence committee: "There might be corroboration for our conversation, there might be a tape. And my judgment was, I needed to get that out into the public square."
But now, there's more reason to doubt any recordings ever existed.
