A recording of what appears to be the president’s voice can be heard on the podcast of John Melendez, a regular guest on shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show. | Alex Wong/Getty Images White House scrambles to figure out how prankster got on the phone with Trump

The White House is scrambling to figure out how a prank call from a comedian who pretended to be Sen. Robert Menendez managed to get a return phone call from the president, a person inside the White House said Friday.

The person inside the White House said the call was routed to the president by the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner and that it was not routed through the office of legislative affairs, which had no record of Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, trying to connect with the president.


And while legislative affairs got notified of the call and subsequently tried to kill it after learning from Menendez’s chief of staff that the senator was not trying to reach Trump, the call was still put through, the person said.

A recording of what appears to be the president’s voice talking to who he seemingly believes to be Menendez can be heard on the podcast of John Melendez, also known as Stuttering John, a regular guest on shock jock Howard Stern’s radio show. Using a British accent and posing as Menendez’s assistant Sean Moore, a name he invented from James Bond actors Sean Connery and Roger Moore, Melendez first called the White House switchboard, which said it could not reach Trump because he was delivering a speech in North Dakota at the time.

Later, Melendez said Kushner called him back, after which he said he and a friend, who posed as the New Jersey senator, were put on the phone with the president.

Breaking News Alerts Get breaking news when it happens — in your inbox. Email Sign Up By signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts from POLITICO. You can unsubscribe at any time. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

POLITICO has not independently confirmed the authenticity of the recording. Spokespeople for the president did not immediately return an email asking if the recording was indeed authentic, if it was Kushner who put the call through to the president, and what the nature of the administration’s response was.

“Hi, Bob. How are you? Congratulations on everything, we're proud of you,” the voice that appears to be Trump’s says after coming on the line. “Congratulations, great job. You went through a tough, tough situation, and I don't think a very fair situation, but congratulations.”

Melendez’s friend then asks about immigration and the separation of families who cross the border illegally, to which the voice on the other end of the phone responds that “I want to be able to take care of the situation every bit as much as anybody else at the top level” but that “I'd like to do the larger solution rather than the smaller solution.”

The two also discussed the soon-to-be-vacated Supreme Court seat of Justice Anthony Kennedy, with the Trump-sounding voice saying that he plans to select a replacement nominee over the next two weeks.

The New Jersey senator issued a statement on Friday afternoon.

“As someone who has spent my entire career trying to convince Republicans to join me in reforming our nation’s broken immigration system,“ Menendez said, “I welcome any opportunity to have a real conversation with the president on how to uphold the American values that guided our family-based immigration policy for the past century. Tearing children apart from their mothers is not part of our proud history. Thus far, this White House has only sabotaged every good-faith effort to find bipartisan common ground on immigration.”

Annie Karni and Matthew Friedman contributed to this report.