An audio recording has been released that includes new details of a 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump discusses the possession of undisclosed secret documents.
The recording, from a July 2021 interview that Trump gave at his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey, to individuals working on the memoirs of his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, serves as crucial evidence in Special Prosecutor Jack Smith's accusation against Trump for mishandling classified information. The recording was first aired on Monday on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360.
The special prosecutor's accusation alleges that attendees of the meeting with Trump (a writer, an editor, and two members of Trump's staff) were shown classified information regarding a Pentagon attack plan in an unspecified foreign country.
"These are the papers," Trump said at one point, indicating that he had in his possession a secret Pentagon document outlining plans to attack Iran. "This was done by the military, they gave it to me."
Trump's reference to something he claims is "highly classified" and his apparent display of documents to others in the meeting could undermine his later claims in an interview with Fox News Channel that he had no documents with him.
"There were no documents. That was a lot of documents, and everything else talking about Iran and other things," Trump said on Fox. "And it may have been withheld or not, but that wasn't a document. I didn't have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. They were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles”.
Earlier this month, Trump pleaded not guilty to 37 charges related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents stored at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Comments