Federal prosecutors obtained an audio recording of a meeting held in the summer of 2021 in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges that he withheld a classified Pentagon document on a potential attack on Iran, CNN reported Wednesday.
The recording would dismantle one of Trump's arguments in the case of the Mar-a-Lago papers, based on the fact that the documents were not classified because he had already declassified them. On the contrary, the recorded conversation would prove that he knew perfectly well that this and other records were secret and should not be in his house.
"Trump's comments suggest that he would like to share the information but knows that he cannot," said two of the sources referred to by the television network.
CNN acknowledges, however, that its staff "did not listen to the recording", which it knows about through people who "described" it to them.
The recorded conversation took place at Trump's golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in July 2021. The sources who reported it consider it "important" evidence in the case that special counsel Jack Smith is pursuing against Trump.
Two people who worked on the autobiography of former Trump Secretary General Mark Meadows participated in that meeting. The book would recount a meeting that "appears to be the same" and during which Trump "recalled a four-page report written by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, with a plan by the general himself to attack Iran." The plan in question involved the deployment of "an immense number of troops"; something Milley would have urged the former president to do more than once during his presidency.
The document that Trump talks about in the recorded meeting would not belong to Milley. However, his possible intervention in the classified plan and the seriousness of the matter would have led the investigators of the case to question the soldier, also indicates CNN.
