Audio of Trump Suggests He Discussed Classified Iran Document: Listen Now - The New York Times
By: Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer (nytimes)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
A recording of a meeting in 2021 in which the former president described a sensitive document in front of him appears to contradict his recent assertion that the material was just news clippings.
By Maggie Haberman and Alan Feuer
June 26, 2023
An audio recording of former President Donald J. Trump in 2021 discussing what he called a "highly confidential" document about Iran that he acknowledged he could not declassify because he was out of office appears to contradict his recent assertion that the material he was referring to was simply news clippings.
Portions of a transcript of the two-minute recording of Mr. Trump were cited by federal prosecutors in the indictment of Mr. Trump on charges that he had put national security secrets at risk by mishandling classified documents after leaving office and then obstructing the government's efforts to retrieve them.
The recording captured his conversation in July 2021 with a publisher and writer working on a memoir by Mr. Trump's final chief of staff, Mark Meadows. In it, Mr. Trump discussed what he described as a "secret" plan regarding Iran drawn up by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Defense Department. Mr. Trump was citing the document in rebutting an account that General Milley feared having to keep him from manufacturing a crisis with Iran in the period after Mr. Trump lost his re-election bid in late 2020.
The audio, which is likely to feature as evidence in Mr. Trump's trial in the documents case, was played for the first time in public on Monday by CNN and was also obtained by The New York Times.
Listen to the Tape of Trump Discussing a Sensitive Document
The recording, cited in former President Donald J. Trump's indictment in the classified documents case, captured his conversation in July 2021 with a publisher and writer working on a memoir by his final chief of staff. In it, Mr. Trump discussed a "secret" plan on Iran drawn up by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Defense Department.
Last week, in an interview with the Fox News host Bret Baier, Mr. Trump insisted that he was not presenting classified material in the meeting, which was recorded at Mr. Trump's golf club at Bedminster, N.J. Mr. Trump said he was not referring to any "secret" or "highly confidential" documents, but was rather talking about "newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles."
But the audio recording of the full encounter suggests that Mr. Trump was referring not to secondhand accounts, but instead to a specific piece of paper, or papers, in front of him.
Joining Mr. Trump at the meeting at Bedminster were those working on an autobiography of Mr. Meadows as well as at least two of Mr. Trump's own aides. Mr. Trump, in his own narration, seems to brandish or point to what he described to his visitors as a document — described in the indictment as a "plan of attack" — apparently to rebut a story published a week earlier in The New Yorker that described General Milley's concern that Mr. Trump could launch a strike against Iranian interests that he could use to help create a justification to remain in office.
"Isn't it amazing?" Trump says as he shuffles through what he calls "a big pile of papers," which he can be heard handling on the recording.
"This thing just came up," Mr. Trump says, adding: "This was him. This was the Defense Department and him."
"Wow," a woman in the room can be heard saying, followed by a rustling of papers.
"Let's see here," Mr. Trump says, adding, "Look." There is a brief pause, during which he appears to show people in the room something, and they start to laugh.
"This totally wins my case, you know," he says, adding that the papers were "highly confidential, secret. This is secret information."
"Isn't that incredible?" Mr. Trump says later, adding, "This was done by the military and given to me."
Then he appears to lean into a suggestion for the book writers. "I think we can probably, right?" Mr. Trump says. A woman responds, "I don't know, we'll have to see, you know, we'll have to try to figure out a —"
"Declassify it," Mr. Trump says. "See, as president I could have declassified it, but now I can't."
"Now we have a problem," the woman says, laughing.
"It's so cool," Mr. Trump says, eventually calling out for someone to bring in Coca-Cola to drink.
In a statement, Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, avoided commenting on the bulk of the recording's content related to the candidate's discussion of sensitive material and instead focused on a quip Mr. Trump made during the meeting about former Representative Anthony D. Weiner's role in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server.
"The audio tape provides context proving, once again, that President Trump did nothing wrong at all," Mr. Cheung said, adding that Mr. Trump was "speaking rhetorically and also quite humorously about" Mr. Weiner, and accusing "the media and the Trump-haters" of taking "the bait."
Some of Mr. Trump's lawyers have been aware of the recording since March, when one of the aides who attended the meeting, Margo Martin, was asked about it during an appearance before the grand jury, according to a person familiar with the events. Investigators working under the special counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed her copy of the tape after that appearance.
The full clip undercuts arguments made by some of Mr. Trump's allies that he was simply blustering and exaggerating or mischaracterizing the material he described in the recording.
The indictment charges Mr. Trump with illegally holding on to 31 individual national security documents and with conspiring with one of his personal aides, Walt Nauta, to obstruct the government's repeated efforts to reclaim the records.
Mr. Nauta is scheduled to be arraigned on the charges in Federal District Court in Miami on Tuesday. As part of the conditions of Mr. Trump's release from his own arraignment, he was ordered not to speak about the case to Mr. Nauta or to a list of 84 witnesses who took part in the special counsel investigation.
Maggie Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of "Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America." She was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump's advisers and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence. He joined The Times in 1999. @alanfeuer
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This story is an elaboration of something that became known a few weeks ago. A more complete version of the audio.
The leaders of the Republican Party, if there are any, should march to MaraLago and demand Trump withdraw from the race .
Oh wait, thats a fantasy.
They'd have to call Trump and ask for his permission before they could go to Mar-a-Lago.
The GOP Embarrassment is disgusting
www.huffpost.com /entry/george-conway-trump-tape_n_649a8de4e4b0d92ebf5219a0
'Sociopathic Criminal': George Conway Says Tape Is Newest Nail In Trump's Coffin
By Josephine Harvey 2-3 minutes
The conservative attorney said it was stunning to hear a former president committing a felony "on audio tape while laughing about it"
Conservative attorney George Conway suggests a newly released audio recording of Donald Trump is a smoking gun in the Justice Department ’s classified documents case against the former president.
“The special counsel already had Trump dead to rights because we knew this tape existed in some form ,” Conway told CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Monday . “But to actually hear a former president of the United States committing a felony ― probably multiple felonies ― on audio tape while laughing about it ... I think it’s just stunning.”
CNN on Monday aired audio of Trump claiming after he left the White House that he possessed classified documents about potential attacks on Iran. He also admitted that he had not declassified them before leaving office, undermining his defense that everything he took to Mar-a-Lago was automatically declassified when he removed it from the White House.
“See, as president I could have declassified it,” Trump says in the clip, recorded during a July 2021 meeting at his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
Conway slammed Trump for being so cavalier about top-secret information that could “lead to the deaths of American servicemen” if it fell into the wrong hands.
“This man has no respect for rules. No respect for the lives of other human beings. No respect for the country. No respect for the Constitution. No respect for his duties. He is a sociopathic criminal. And this is just another nail in the coffin,” said Conway,
The audio is reportedly a key piece of evidence in Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s case, in which Trump was indicted on 37 criminal counts earlier this month. The former president is accused of repeatedly risking national security and refusing to return boxes of sensitive documents stashed at his his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, in defiance of a government subpoena.
Trump Lists All the “Villains” He Plans to Destroy in a Second Term, Assuming He’s Not Serving Time for His Many Alleged Crimes
“This is the final battle,” he told supporters on Sunday.
By Bess Levin
Jun 26, 2023 03:47 PM
There are many reasons to fear a potential second term in office for Donald Trump . His reported plan to replace government experts with political loyalists, for one. His weird obsession with toilets , for another. The fact that his reaction to losing the last election was to incite a violent attack on the US Capitol that left five people dead , obviously. Also very much at the top of the list ? His stated plan to exact revenge on all of his perceived enemies—and rid the country of people he just doesn’t like.
Yes—following news of Trump’s alleged vow to “immediately” fire anyone who investigated him should he be reelected—the ex-president spent a large chunk of a speech in Michigan on Sunday listing the “villains” he would use his power as POTUS to eliminate. “This is the final battle,” Trump told the audience at the Oakland County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner. “With you at my side, we will demolish the deep state. We will expel the warmongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the Communists, Marxists, and Fascists, and we will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, and we will defeat crooked Joe Biden. We will liberate America from these villains once and for all.”
Not surprisingly, he also claimed that the many criminal investigations into his actions—two of which have thus far resulted in multicount indictments—are only happening because he’s doing well in the polls and not because he committed a cornucopia of (alleged) crimes, some of which he could do many years in prison for if convicted .
Naturally, Trump also used the speech to trot out a number of his favorite lies, like that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that he’s a big tough guy when it comes to China (fact-check: not so much ), and vowed to end the Russia-Ukraine war. (He’s previously said he has the ability to do this “immediately”—but for reasons that remain unclear, cannot tell anyone else how until he’s president again.) And in a bit of catnip to the base, he promised to cut funding to schools that teach critical race theory and “transgenderism.”
But of course, it wouldn’t be a Trump speech without at least one truly WTF moment, like when the ex-president—a man who regularly gives Satan himself a run for his money—declared that Biden, a devout Catholic, is “not in favor of religion,” because apparently if you don’t impose your religious views on other people you’re anti-religion.
Yet Trump supporters / defenders continue to exist ... albeit a bit more silent nowadays.