Telling Fox News that he did “nothing wrong” in response to the leaked recording of him waving around “highly confidential” documents he admittedly did not declassify, the ex-president grumbled on Tuesday that the conservative cable giant was “fake news.”
CNN obtained an audio tape of a 2021 meeting between Trump and several people working on the memoir of Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff. In the recording, which matches up with evidence included in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump for mishandling classified documents, the ex-president indicated he was in possession of secret defense documents about an Iran attack plan.
“These are the papers,” Trump said on the tape. “See, as president, I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”
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Acknowledging to his staff and guests that the documents remained confidential, Trump added: “It’s so cool.”
The recording undercuts what Trump claimed in a testy interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier last week. “There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” the former president insisted to Baier. “And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles.”
On Tuesday, Trump was asked by a Fox News reporter how he could square his previous comments to Baier with what the audio recording reveals. In Trumpian fashion, the ex-president praised himself and claimed the whole issue was fabricated.
“I said it very clearly—I had a whole desk full of lots of papers, mostly newspaper articles, copies of magazines, copies of different plans, copies of stories, having to do with many, many subjects, and what was said was absolutely fine,” Trump groused. “We did nothing wrong. This is a whole hoax.”
Echoing his “perfect phone call” claims, he continued: “My voice was fine. What did I say wrong on those recordings? I didn’t even see the recording. All I know is I did nothing wrong.”
Of course, since he’s currently in the midst of his never-ending love-hate relationship with Fox, he had to bestow the network with his favorite pejorative for media outlets he dislikes.
“We had a lot of papers, a lot of papers stacked up,” he declared. “In fact, you hear the rustle of the paper. And nobody said that I did anything wrong other than the fake news, which is Fox, too.”
Trump then shrugged off the possibility of additional recordings, asserting, “I don’t do things wrong” because “I’m a legitimate person.” (In a Truth Social post on Monday night, Trump also proclaimed the tape was “actually an exoneration” while raging about how this “continuing Witch Hunt is another ELECTION INTERFERENCE Scam.”)
Having already fumed to Baier that Fox News was “hostile,” Trump later ran to far-right competitor Newsmax to further complain about how “nasty” and unfair the network had been to him. He also reiterated that it was unlikely he’d participate in the first 2024 GOP presidential primary debate, which Baier and Fox News anchor Martha MacCallum will moderate.
“When I did the interview with Bret, I thought it was fine. I thought it was OK,” he told Newsmax host Eric Bolling on Monday. “But there was nothing friendly about it. You know, it was nasty, and I thought I did a good job. I’ve been getting credit for doing a good job.”
He was also displeased that Baier didn’t gleefully join him in trying to “make America great again,” moaning that “everything was unfriendly” and there was “no smiling.”
