Global Courant
ABC News has obtained an audio recording of former President Donald Trump appearing to acknowledge that he possessed a sensitive military document after he left office, but can no longer release it because he is no longer president.
The contents of the recording, taken at a July 21, 2021 rally at Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, have previously been reported and cited in the Justice Department’s 37-count indictment regarding Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving office. — but the recording itself has never been heard in public before.
ABC News was able to confirm the authenticity of the recording from another source it heard.
The meeting involved people who, according to sources, helped former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows with his memoirs. Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team spoke with meeting attendees, including Meadows’ autobiographers and at least two of Trump’s aides, sources tell ABC News.
The recording shows Trump attacking the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, and references a document Trump claimed Milley had prepared.
“Well, with Milley — uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example,” Trump says on the recording. “He said I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that great? I’ve got a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented this to me — this is off the record, but… – they presented this to me. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some – this was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him. All sorts of things — pages long, look.”
“Wait a minute, let’s see. I just found it, isn’t that great?” says Trump. “This totally wins my case, you know. Except it’s like, highly confidential. Secret. This is classified information. Look, look. This was done by the military and given to me. As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t.”
In this November 15, 2022 file photo, former President Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida.
Andrew Harnik/AP, DOSSIER
Trump pleaded not guilty this month to 37 felony counts related to his handling of classified material after prosecutors said he repeatedly refused to return hundreds of documents containing classified information ranging from US nuclear secrets to the country’s defense capabilities. He has denied all allegations and condemned the probe as a political witch hunt.
Prosecutors say Trump’s admission on the recording that he could no longer release the document undermines his argument that he released all documents in his possession before leaving the White House.
The audio recording was first published by CNN.
“The tape provides context that once again proves that President Trump has done absolutely nothing wrong. The president speaks rhetorically and also quite humorously,” a Trump campaign spokesman said of the recording.
“As we said from the moment President Trump rode down the golden escalator, the president did nothing wrong,” Trump himself said in a statement.
In an interview with Fox News last week, Trump denied that the material in his possession at Bedminster was classified.
“It wasn’t a document, okay? I had a lot of paper — I had copies of newspaper articles, I had copies of magazines,” Trump said during the Fox News interview. “There was no document. That was a huge amount of papers and everything else that talked about Iran and other things. And it may have stopped or not, but that was not a document.”
“I didn’t necessarily have a document,” Trump said. “There was nothing to release. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”
ABC News reported earlier this month that Trump’s lawyers had not found the material Trump referenced in the recording.
