Donald Trump admitted in a 2021 meeting that he had kept “secret information” that he hadn’t declassified, according to CNN.
The bombshell disclosure comes the day after Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to face federal charges in relation to allegations of mishandling classified documents following his departure from the White House.
Trump has maintained that all of the documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago had been declassified, but CNN reports that he said of one file two years ago: “As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t.”
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The file in question allegedly concerns a secret Pentagon document about attacking Iran. Audio of the recording from the 2021 meeting had already been obtained by prosecutors, but now CNN says it has seen a transcript of Trump’s comments appearing to show that he was aware that he hadn’t declassified the document.
The meeting at Trump’s resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, allegedly included the former president and two people working on the autobiography of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, along with several others working for Trump, one of whom was communications specialist Margo Martin.
Sources cited by CNN say the audio recording of the meeting contains the sound of paper rustling, indicating that Trump was waving the document around, though there’s no way of knowing if it was the document about Iran. “Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” the transcript records Trump as saying. “This was done by the military and given to me.”
The transcript also shows Trump complaining about an article in The New Yorker published a few days before the meeting that described how Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Joint Chiefs to make sure there were no unlawful orders from Trump in his last days in office.
“Well, with Milley—uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran,” Trump says in the transcript, according to CNN. “Isn’t that 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,” Trump continues. “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.” CNN reports that he later adds: “I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.”
It’s not clear if any of the seven charges brought Thursday from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation refer to the 2021 meeting, as details of the indictment have not yet been made publicly available. But prosecutors did subpoena Trump in March for the document discussed in the recording. In response, his lawyers handed over some files related to Iran and Milley, but they could not locate the document itself.
Two sources briefed on the charges against Trump told MSNBC they include conspiracy to obstruct false statements and conspiracy to obstruct. For his own part, Trump responded to news of the indictment by attacking President Joe Biden, dismissing the allegations against him as “the Boxes Hoax,” and insisting: “I AM AN INNOCENT MAN!”
He added that he would arraigned in federal court in Miami on Tuesday afternoon.
