Audio: Trump Caught Showing Off Classified Doc He’s Said He Didn’t Have

Earlier this month, Trump was arrested and pleaded not guilty to 37 federal counts, including violations of the Espionage Act, conspiracy to obstruct justice, corruptly concealing a record or document, and concealing a document in a federal investigation.

In their indictment, the department alleges that the recording is proof Trump not only kept documents containing highly classified national security information, but showed them to individuals not authorized to view them. The full audio of the conversation had previously been unavailable to the public. 

In the recording, Trump can be heard shuffling papers and discussing an “example” of documents provided to him by General Mark Milley containing alleged plans to attack Iran. The New Yorker had previously reported in 2021 that Milley was concerned the former president was intent on leveling an attack against Iran in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

“Let me see that, I’ll show you an example,” Trump says on the tape. “They presented me this — this is off the record” he adds as someone sorts through papers in the background.

“He said that I wanted to attack Iran, Isn’t it amazing?” Trump explains. “I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him… They presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.”

“This wasn’t done by me,” he adds, “they never met a war they didn’t want.”

Trump joked with others present in the room about Hillary Clinton printing out copies of classified materials. 

“Hillary would print that out all the time, you know. Her private emails,” one person can be heard saying.

“No, she’d send it to Anthony Weiner,” Trump responds. 

The tape also contains an admission that he had not taken steps to declassify the document before leaving office.

“It is like, highly confidential,” Trump told those present, “See as president I could have declassified it… Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

And, because apparently spilling national security secrets leaves one parched, the former president can later be heard requesting a round of Cokes for himself and his audience.

Trump has claimed on multiple occasions that he secretly declassified the documents he took from the White House, even going so far to say that he had the power to do so telepathically. But despite the former president’s dubious claim to a sixth sense, his story regarding the documents has continuously shifted.

Last week, in an interview with Fox News, Trump insisted to Bret Baier that the whole thing was just a big mix-up, literally. The former president told the Fox host that all those classified documents had simply found their way into his boxes of golf shirts during the rush to move out of the White House. “Like every other president I take things out,” Trump said. “In my case, I took it out pretty much in a hurry. People packed it up and left. I had clothing in there, I had all sorts of personal items in there. Much, much stuff.”

When Baier questioned him regarding the contents of the recording, Trump denied that such a document even existed. “Bret, there was no document,” Trump said “That was a massive amount of papers and everything else, talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not. That was not a document. I didn’t have any document per se. There was nothing to declassify, these were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles.”