Former President Donald Trump has denied ever having a classified document about attacking Iran, despite the fact that a recording exists of him discussing a document he kept from his presidency.
Mr. Trump spoke in an interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier at his Bedminster, New Jersey, estate less than a week after pleading not guilty to 37 charges in a federal court in Miami over the Miami charges. A federal grand jury indicted him for allegedly intentionally mishandling classified documents, obstructing justice and making false statements.
Late last month, CNN reported that federal prosecutors obtained an audio recording from the summer of 2021 in which Mr. Trump admitted to holding a classified Pentagon document detailing a potential attack on Iran.
But Mr Trump denied having the document.
“I had a lot of paper, I had copies of newspaper articles, I had copies of magazines,” he said.
Baier responded by reading the indictment in which Mr Trump said the plan to attack Iran was “top secret” and “secret” and that “as president I could have declassified it”. The former president is then allegedly recorded adding: “I can’t now, you know, but it’s still a secret.”
When confronted with the alleged tape – which is apparently cross-referenced with testimony from people in the room at the time – Mr Trump told Baier: “When I said I can’t declassify it now, that’s because I wasn’t the president, I have never thought about it. When I’m not the president, I can’t declassify.”
Mr. Trump has denied that such a document even exists.
“It was a huge amount of documents and everything talking about Iran and stuff,” he said. “And he may or may not have been detained, but it was not a document. I had no document myself.
Baier responded by saying he was reading what the indictment said on the tape, as well as from people in the room who testified about Mr. Trump’s.
“These people are very dishonest people,” he said. “They are thugs. If you look at what they’ve done to other people and been overturned in the US Supreme Court, they’re thugs.
The unsealed indictment said Mr. Trump met with a writer and publisher of the book by his former White House chief of staff, Mark Maddow. After the meeting, the indictment says, Mr. Trump said, “Look what I found,” and showed an unnamed military official the plan to attack Iran. The official was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.
At the time, neither the writer nor the publisher had security clearances.
Baier said Mr Trump is believed to have requested the documents because there is evidence that the US military and General Milley sent him pre-emptive plans for an attack on Iran and that Mr Trump did not order such an attack to take place .
But Mr Trump denied doing so and continued to attack General Milley.
“Millie, quite frankly, was incompetent,” he said. “The last person I would want to attack with as my leader would be Milly.”
The case Bayer is discussing is one of two in which Mr. Trump is alleged to have shown classified information to people who were not authorized to see it.
On the second occasion in August or September 2021, also in Bedminster, Mr Trump commented on a military operation that was not going well and reportedly showed a representative of his political action committee a classified map of the country before saying that should not show it.
The interview is Mr Trump’s first with Fox News, a network he has regularly feuded with since leaving office. Mr Trump maintains his innocence. Mr. Trump also explained to Bayer why he did not return documents to the National Archives and Records Administration.
“The only way NARA can get this stuff, this back, would be ‘please, please, please, can we get it back?'” he said.
He also said many of the documents were “scattered” with personal items.
“I want to go through the boxes and take out all my personal stuff. I don’t want to give it to the (National Archives) yet. And I’ve been very busy, as you’ve seen,” he said.