By The FirstOn Monday, CNN broadcasted an audio recording of former President Donald Trump discussing “highly confidential, secret” documents.
The recording was initially aired by CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who stated it was made in July 2021, during a meeting at Trump’s club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The attendees, according to Cooper, included a writer working on a memoir for Mark Meadows, Trump’s former Chief of Staff, the memoir’s publisher, and two of Trump’s staff members.
In the leaked audio, amidst what sounds like the shuffling of papers, Trump can be heard saying, “I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was [General Mark Milley.] They presented me this – this is off the record but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.”
He continues, seemingly excited, “All sorts of stuff, pages long. Let’s see here. Isn’t that amazing. This totally wins my case, you know, except that it is like highly confidential, secret, this is secret information.”
However, the former president reveals his current limitations in another portion of the audio, saying, “When I was president, I could have declassified it, now I can’t.”
The audio poses stark contradictions to an interview that Trump conducted last week with Fox News’ Bret Baier. In that interview, Trump denied having any classified documents with him during that July 2021 meeting. He told Baier emphatically, “There was no document.”
In response to the audio, a spokesperson for Trump defended the former president, stating, “the audio tape provides context proving, once again, that President Trump did nothing wrong at all.”
The spokesperson went on to add, “The President is speaking rhetorically and also quite humorously about a very perverted individual, Anthony Weiner, who was deep inside the corrupt Clinton campaign.”
Listen to the audio below:
