Federal indictments charging former President Donald Trump with 37 crimes related to his withholding US national security secrets include a transcript of Trump discussing a Pentagon ‘plan of attack’ on Iran and the apparently showing two staff members and two people working on a biography of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. CNN obtained the audio of that conversation and aired it Monday night.
In the audio – also obtained and published by The New York Times and The Washington Post – Trump is heard pulling out what he described as “highly confidential and secret” papers at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey in July 2021. “It’s secret information,” he added. “It was made by the military and given to me.” Trump made it clear he was trying to refute a claim by General Mark Milley that Trump favored the invasion of Iran, and he seemed to want Meadows’ biographers to include the articles in their book.
“I think we probably can, can’t we?” said Trump. An aide replied, “I don’t know, we’ll have to see, you know, we’ll have to try to find a -” “Declassify it,” Trump interjected. “You see, as president, I could have declassified it, but now I can’t.” The woman laughed saying, “Now we have a problem.”
Parts of the 2-minute audio clip are not included in the indictment, including Trump and an aide joking that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton allegedly printed or emailed the documents. The indictment also omitted Trump saying, “Those are the papers.”
Trump told Fox News earlier in June that he “didn’t have a document per se,” during his Bedminster chat. “There was nothing to declassify. It was newspaper articles, magazine articles and articles.” The audio seems to heavily undermine this version of events. Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told CNN “the audio tape provides context proving, once again, that President Trump has done nothing wrong at all.”
The audio is expected to be a key piece of evidence in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump, as well as an incident a month or two later in which Trump allegedly showed a classified map of ‘Country B’ to a representative of his political action committee. , noted the Post. The feds clearly did not retrieve Trump’s attack on Iran document, and federal agents did not search Bedminster for classified documents.
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