Donald Trump says the secret document he described on tape refers to news clippings

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Former President Donald Trump told a Fox News anchor in an interview Monday that he did not have a classified document with him at a meeting with a book publisher even though he referred to that meeting as classified information on his property.

The July 2021 meeting at Trumps golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey was recorded by at least two people who attended, and a transcript depicts the former president pointing to a pile of papers and then talking about Gen. Mark Milley, whom he criticizes. : Look. It’s him. They presented to me that it was not recorded, but they showed it to me. It’s him. It was the Department of Defense and him.

In the recording, according to two people familiar with its contents, Trump can be heard flipping through papers as he talks to a publisher and writer working on a book by his late White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Trump and the people at the meeting did not say explicitly what document the former president was holding.

According to the transcript, Trump described the document, which he claimed showed Milleys desire to attack Iran, as secret and similarly, highly confidential. He also declared that as president, I could declassify it, adding, Now I can’t, you know, but it’s still a secret.

But in an interview Monday with Fox News anchor Bret Baier, Trump denied he was referring to an actual document and said he was only referring to news clippings and magazine clippings.

There is no document, Trump insisted. That was an enormous amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may or may not have been held up, but that is not a document. I don’t have a document per se. Nothing should be declassified. These are newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.

Apparently reducing the information from the recording, he added, I dont think that Ive ever seen a document from Milley.

The audio recording is a key piece of evidence in an indictment charging Trump with illegally handling 31 sensitive government documents, some of which are highly classified and include information about the country’s nuclear and military capabilities. US. The suit was filed this month by Jack Smith, a special counsel appointed by the Justice Department, in US District Court in Miami. The indictment also accused Trump of conspiring with one of his aides, Walt Nauta, to avoid a grand jury subpoena issued in May for all classified material in his possession.

A description of a typewritten document by Milley appears in Meadows’ book, unrelated and stated as fact.

Criminal defendants typically avoid speaking publicly about the details of any charges in their case, for fear of having their statements used against them. The interview was broadcast the same day that a federal magistrate judge in Trump’s case issued a protective order instructing him not to disclose any evidence provided to his legal team as part of the impeachment process. discovery

While the interview does not appear to violate that order, his remarks represent some of his most extensive comments about the nearly two years that federal officials have spent trying to obtain material from his presidential personal- owned by the government. The comments are also the latest in a series of shifting stories he and his allies have offered since it became public that officials at the National Archives and Records Administration seized 15 boxes of material from Trump in January 2022.

Earlier in the interview with Baier, Trump appeared to admit that even after the Justice Department issued a subpoena last year for all the classified documents in his possession, he delayed complying with it to separate any personal which record may belong to them.

Before I send the boxes, I have to get all my stuff out, Trump said. These boxes are filled with all kinds of things.

Trump also admitted that he did not immediately comply with an earlier request to return government records to the archives, telling Baier that he gave the archives some and kept, I’m busy, as you saw.

A spokesman for Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In February 2022, after it became public knowledge that Trump had returned classified material to the archive, the former president ordered aides to issue a statement saying he had returned everything to the government. The final statement issued by the Trump team did not make this claim.

But a draft version of that statement has become the focus of prosecutors presenting evidence and hearing testimony before a Florida grand jury, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination for 2024, and his allies have offered evolving explanations for his possession of classified material and repeated refusals to turn it over. He claimed the documents were all his as personal records. He also said he declared everything he removed before he left the White House, through a so-called standing order, that the material was declassified when he left the Oval Office to go to the White House residence. Former senior White House officials said no such order existed.

And last month, Trumps lawyers wrote a letter to Congress saying that his staff quickly packed everything into boxes and shipped them to Florida, leaving the impression that Trump himself did not go through the material and did not know what was in the boxes when they were packed.

The indictment disputes that claim, with prosecutors saying Trump was personally involved in the process and caused his boxes, containing hundreds of classified documents, to be transported from White House to the Mar-a-Lago club.

In his interview with Baier, the former president indicated that he repaired several boxes after shipping them from Washington to Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida.

At one point, Baier asked Trump why he didn’t just hand over the material.

I want to go through the boxes and take out all my personal things, Trump said. I don’t want to give that to NARA.

c.2023 The New York Times Company

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