In a meeting in Bedminster, New Jersey in 2021, President Donald Trump discussed having access to classified documents that he had not declassified. CNN has obtained the audio recording of that meeting exclusively.
The recording contains fresh information from the conversation that is a key piece of evidence in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump for the improper handling of classified information. There is even a passage where Trump appears to suggest he was holding a classified Pentagon document with plans to attack Iran.
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In the audio recording, when talking about the Pentagon attack plans, Trump utters the phrase “These are the papers,” which was omitted from the indictment.
In the two-minute audio clip, Trump and his staff also make light of Hillary Clinton’s emails when she claims that they include “secret information.”
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“You know, Hillary would print that out all the time. Her private emails,” a member of Trump’s team said.
Trump replied, alluding to the former Democratic congressman, “No, she’d send it to Anthony Weiner,” which caused those present to chuckle.
The former president’s claims that he did not have any documents with him in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier last week may be called into question by Trump’s statements on the audio recording, in which he says “these are the papers” and refers to something he calls “highly confidential” and appears to be showing others in the room.
“There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” Trump said on Fox. “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.”
