If after this Donald Trump is not convicted…
In a conversation with his assistants and interviewers, the former president of the United States acknowledged two years ago the “highly confidential” nature of a document about a possible attack on Iran that he was carrying and did not hesitate to show to these people despite not having authorization to access classified papers.
The conversation was recorded in an audio broadcast by CNN on Monday night and is part of the summary in which the Prosecutor’s Office charges Trump with a total of 37 charges on seven federal criminal offenses, including those of conspiracy to obstruct justice , witness tampering, false statement and deliberate withholding of secret documents in violation of the Espionage Act.
In the friendly conversation that could sink him, which he had with two of the assistants and a writer and an editor working on the memoirs of the former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, the former president stated in no uncertain terms that the document what he was showing them was top secret. And he added: “Look: as president I could have declassified him. I can’t now, but it’s still a secret.”
The statement demonstrates Trump’s full awareness of what he had in hand when, upon leaving the White House, he took hundreds of classified records with him to the private residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida; including this one about a hypothetical plan against Iran and many other compromising papers for the security of the nation and some of the spies, as it transpired when in August the FBI confiscated the last documents that had been stubborn to hide
The meeting where Trump revealed the content of the paper on Iran was held in July 2021 at his holiday resort in Bedminster (New Jersey). The ultra leader wielded the document to try to deny that he had intended to attack the Islamic Republic, an intention he attributed, instead, to the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States, General Mark Milley. The country’s mainstream media, however, told a very different story: According to the multiple sources they cited, it was Milley who opposed the attack in question … when Trump suggested the idea.
The audio is a resounding denial of the former president’s persistent statements that neither this nor the rest of the documents he hid at Mar-a-Lago were secret; among other things, because he could declassify any paper “just by thinking about it”, as he said time and time again.
“These are the papers”, he pointed out at the July 2021 meeting while warning of their “high confidentiality” and of the “unofficial” act that constituted the exhibition of the document. “The military did it, they gave it to me”, he insisted: the opposite of what, without going any further, he pointed out last week in an interview with the Fox News channel. Here he assured that at the meeting in Bedminster “there was no document as such”. It was “a large amount of papers that talked about Iran and other things”. And “were they able to hold back or not”. But there was no secret record and “nothing to classify”, version coming “from newspaper stories in magazines and articles”, he added.
Special prosecutor Jack Smith, chiefly responsible for this investigation and the one that is also being pursued against Trump for his role in the storming of the Capitol, could hardly have found more compelling evidence to prove to a jury the responsibility of the also a candidate for re-election in the presidential elections of 2024. The public prosecution must prove the ex-president’s guilt, that is, the awareness and intentionality in the commission of the crimes attributed to him. And the audio that has now been released can be key in this regard.
The former president looked excited and proud when he showed the secret paper on Iran. “It’s so cool!” he exclaimed. And, to celebrate, he said to someone: “Hey, bring some Coke here, please.”
