Former President Donald Trump said he was holding random sheets of papers, not revealing classified documents during an audio recording in which he was heard mentioning classified material.
“I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth, it was bravado,” Trump told ABC News and Semafor in an interview on June 27. “I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.”
“I just held up a whole pile of—my desk is loaded up with papers. I have papers from 25 different things,” Trump added.
On Monday, CNN first aired the audio recording in which it sounded like the former president was describing military plans for an attack on Iran. A partial transcript of the recording appears to match up with a portion of special counsel Jack Smith’s 37-count federal indictment against Trump, which describes a meeting between Trump, a writer, a publisher, and two members of his staff in July 2021. During the meeting, they talked about the attack plan while interviewing Trump for a memoir about his former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.
In the recording, Trump said Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley formulated an attack plan on Iran, despite claims reported by media that Milley feared the former president would start a war with Iran.
“I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know,” Trump says in the audio recording. “Except it is, like, highly confidential, secret, this is secret information. Look. Look at this, you attack, and….”
Trump later says, “These are the papers … this was done by the military and given to me. I think we can probably, right?”
An unnamed speaker responds, “I don’t know, we’ll have to see, we’ll have to try to figure out a….”
“Declassify it,” Trump interrupts, before adding, “See, as president I could have declassified it.”
“Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret,” Trump says.
During the Tuesday interview, Trump was asked if he had any regrets about the ways he had handled classified documents.
“No, I have no regrets,” he said. “I didn’t have a classified document. There was no classified document on my desk.”
By Frank Fang
