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An audio recording obtained by U.S. news organizations reveals former President Donald Trump discussing secret documents about a plan to attack Iran after leaving office in 2021, undercutting his recent claim that the papers he was looking at were newspaper and magazine articles.
Federal prosecutors cited parts of the July 2021 conversation in a 37-count indictment earlier this month on charges that he illegally retained classified government documents when his presidency ended and then conspired to obstruct a federal investigation.
CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times released the audio clip Monday in which Trump comments on news reports that Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley feared Trump would manufacture a conflict with Iran after losing the 2020 presidential election.
"With Milley, let me see that, I'll show you an example," Trump says in the recording, which includes the sound of shuffling papers. "He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn't it amazing? I have a big pile of papers; this thing just came up. Look, this was him, they presented me this. This is off the record, but they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him."
"This totally wins my case, you know?" Trump says in rejecting the notion that he was planning an attack on Iran. "Except it is, like, highly confidential, secret. This is secret information."
Trump later says, "See, as president I could have declassified it, now I can't."
In an interview last week, Trump told Fox News, "There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else, talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not. That was not a document. I didn't have any document per se. There was nothing to declassify, these were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles."
The former president has said he had a "standing order" to declassify all documents taken from the Oval Office to the White House residence while he was president, later saying that he could declassify documents by merely thinking about doing so.
There is, however, a formal process for declassifying U.S. national security materials and officials say there is no evidence that Trump followed that official procedure before taking the classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida estate where he lives in the winter months.
He pleaded not guilty to the indictment earlier this month. Trump's valet, Walt Nauta, was also indicted in the case, accused of helping Trump hide the classified material from investigators. He has yet to enter a plea in the case, and his arraignment was delayed Tuesday until July 6.
Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith filed the classified documents indictment against Trump. Smith separately is investigating Trump's actions in trying to upend the outcome of the 2020 election that he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and his role in the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol in which about 2,000 Trump supporters stormed the building to try to block lawmakers from officially certifying that Biden had won.
Meanwhile, a prosecutor in the southern state of Georgia has signaled that she will decide in early August whether to charge Trump and an array of associates with illegally trying to overturn Biden's narrow victory in the state. Three weeks before leaving office, Trump was recorded in a call to Georgia election officials asking them to "find" him enough votes, nearly 12,000, so he would win the state by a single vote over Biden.