Alina Habba, a spokesperson for Donald Trump, on Tuesday struggled to articulate what the former president’s current defense is regarding a leaked audio tape which appears to capture the moment he shared a document he called “highly confidential” and which he said contained “secret information” with others at his Bedminster Golf Club.
Trump, who has been indicted for willful retention of national defense information (among other crimes), also said of the document, “See, as president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t.”
Last September, Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity that he “declassified everything.”
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Last week, he seemed to abandon that story in another interview with Fox’s Bret Baier. He said he was not talking about a document, but rather “newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.” Trump also told Semafor and ABC News Tuesday while on his plane: “I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.” He added: “I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth, it was bravado.”
Appearing on Fox News Tonight, Habba was asked about where Trump currently stands on the matter.
“Is it the position of the president that when he was having that conversation [that] the information he was talking about was already declassified or was it what he told Brett Baier: that it was a news article there?” Lawrence Jones asked. “Or is it either/or, or is it both?”
“I don’t know,” replied Habba. “And here’s what I do know: the clip they put out doesn’t answer that question.”
Habba then offered an extremely literal reading of Trump’s comment acknowledging that he “could have” declassified the document while president, but in July 2021 could not.
“All it says is President Trump said, ‘Hi, look, if I was president I can declassify a classified document and when you’re not president you can’t. Only the president can do that’” she said. “What does that say? Well, it says exactly what dual system of justice we’re living in. That’s what I heard. That’s what I saw.”
Trump, in a Truth Social post Monday night after the audio tape was released, actually claimed the recording was “an exoneration.”
