Donald Trump told Semafor and ABC News that in an audio recording of a 2021 meeting, he was not showing secret documents, but that it was “bravado.”“I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.” He said that what he had were newspaper articles and printouts of various speeches.Trump referred to the material as “highly confidential,” while he told the participants in the 2021 conversation that it was “off the record.” The indictment claims that Trump “showed and described a ‘plan of attack'” to a writer, publisher and two members of his staff, none of whom had security clearances.CNN obtained the audio recording of a 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump discussed having secret documents he did not declassify.The network ran the audio on Anderson Cooper 360. In it, Trump seemed to be showing the confidential documents to others in the room, as they had a discussion about Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.Portions of the audio are cited in the federal indictment of Trump over his withholding of classified documents after he left the White House.In the conversation, reportedly with the writers of Mark Meadows autobiography, Trump referred to the document and that it remained classified.“See as president I could have declassified it,” Trump says. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News’ Bret Baier that he “didn’t have a document, per se,” and instead suggested that he was showing newspaper and magazine stories. Yet in the audio, Trump seems to be referring to classified material when he says, amid the sound of shuffling papers, “This is secret information. Look, look at this.” The classified documents reportedly were Pentagon plans for an attack on Iran.
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