Trump Was Taped Discussing Sensitive Document He
Had Kept After Leaving Office
Federal prosecutors obtained the recording as part of
their investigation into the former president’s handling of classified
documents.
By Maggie
Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Alan Feuer
May 31,
2023
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/31/us/politics/trump-tape-document.html
Federal
prosecutors investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of
classified material have a recording of Mr. Trump from 2021 discussing a
sensitive military document he had kept after leaving the White House, two people
briefed on the matter said.
In the
recording, Mr. Trump suggested he knew the document was secret and had not
declassified it, one person briefed on the matter said.
The
existence of the recording could undermine Mr. Trump’s repeated claim that he
had already declassified material that remained in his possession after he left
office. Prosecutors are scrutinizing whether Mr. Trump obstructed efforts by
federal officials to retrieve documents he took with him after leaving office
and whether he violated laws governing the handling of classified material.
The
existence of the recording was reported earlier by CNN.
The
recording was made during a meeting Mr. Trump held in July 2021 with people
helping his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, write a memoir of his 10
months in the White House, according to the people briefed on the matter. The
meeting was held at Mr. Trump’s club at Bedminster, N.J., where he spends
summers.
Until now,
the focus of the documents investigation has been largely on material Mr. Trump
kept with him at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, rather
than in New Jersey.
Mr. Meadows
did not attend the meeting, but at least two of Mr. Trump’s aides did. One,
Margo Martin, routinely taped the interviews he gave for books being written
about him that year.
On the
recording, Mr. Trump began railing about his handpicked chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark A. Milley, who was described in media accounts at
the time as having guarded against Mr. Trump’s striking Iran in the final days
of the presidency, according to the people briefed on the matter.
Mr. Trump
then began referencing a document that he had with him, saying that it had been
compiled by General Milley and was related to attacking Iran, the people
briefed on the matter said. Among other comments, he mentioned his
classification abilities during the discussion, one person briefed on the
matter said. Mr. Trump can be heard handling paper on the tape, though it is
not clear whether it was the document in question.
The Justice
Department obtained the recording in recent months, a potentially key piece in
a mountain of evidence that prosecutors have amassed under the special counsel,
Jack Smith, since he was appointed in November to oversee the federal
investigations into Mr. Trump.
Ms. Martin
was asked about the recording during a grand jury appearance, according to two
of the people briefed on the matter.
In an
interview with CNN on Wednesday night, James Trusty, a lawyer representing Mr.
Trump in the case, indicated that the former president was taking the position
that he had declassified the material he took with him upon leaving office.
“When he
left for Mar-a-Lago with boxes of documents that other people packed for him
that he brought, he was the commander in chief,” Mr. Trusty said. “There is no
doubt that he has the constitutional authority as commander in chief to
declassify.”
Mr. Trusty
said officials could prove that Mr. Trump had declassified material. But when
pressed on whether Mr. Trump had declassified the document in question at the
Bedminster meeting, Mr. Trusty declined to say.
In total,
the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings
from Mr. Trump since he left office. They include a first batch of documents
returned in January of last year to the National Archives, another set provided
by Mr. Trump’s aides to the Justice Department that June, material seized by
the F.B.I. in the search of Mar-a-Lago in August and a handful found in
additional searches late last year.
One set of
documents found by the F.B.I. during the search had the highest level of
classification, top secret/sensitive compartmented information.
Mr. Trump
has long touted what he claimed was his ability to automatically declassify
materials and has even said he could do so with his mind.
His allies
have insisted he had a standing order to declassify material when he took it
from the Oval Office to the White House residence, a claim that several former
senior administration officials have suggested is nonsense. Members of his
legal team have cautioned his aides not to lean too heavily on that argument as
a defense in the documents case.
That claim was
raised most vocally by Kash Patel, a close adviser to Mr. Trump who testified
to a grand jury under an immunity deal forced on him by prosecutors.
The
recording obtained by the special counsel’s office could help prosecutors
undercut any argument by Mr. Trump that the documents he had taken from the
White House upon leaving office were declassified. It could also assist them in
making a case that Mr. Trump was aware that his abilities to possess — and to
show off — classified materials were limited.
Moreover,
one of the laws cited by the Justice Department in seeking the warrant used to
search Mar-a-Lago last year, known as the Espionage Act, was enacted by
Congress during World War I, decades before President Harry S. Truman issued an
executive order creating the modern classification system for the executive
branch.
As a
result, the Espionage Act makes no reference to whether a document has been
deemed classified. Instead, it makes it a crime to retain, without
authorization, documents related to the national defense that could be used to
harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.
Investigators
have been asking witnesses about General Milley in various interviews for
several weeks, although they have generally left unclear what they were looking
for.
Investigators
have several if not all of the recordings of book interviews that Mr. Trump
gave, according to two of the people familiar with the events.
In one
interview, Mr. Trump said he had taken “nothing of great urgency” when asked if
he had anything in his possession.
Mr. Trump
has equivocated when asked if he ever showed any classified documents to people
once he left the White House. At a CNN town hall event in May, he said, “Not
really. I would have the right to. By the way, they were declassified after.”
Mr.
Meadows, in his book, appeared to echo Mr. Trump’s claim about General Milley.
“The
president recalls a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself,” the book
said. “It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive
numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once
during his presidency. President Trump denied those requests every time.”
Yet
according to a person familiar with the document in question, the report was
not written by General Milley and appears to date to an earlier period in the
Trump administration, when Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr. was the chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff and Jim Mattis was the defense secretary.
General
Milley has been interviewed by investigators about the matter, according to one
person briefed on the discussion.
Maggie
Haberman is a senior political correspondent and the author of “Confidence Man:
The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.” She was part of a team
that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for reporting on President Trump’s advisers
and their connections to Russia. @maggieNYT
Jonathan
Swan is a political reporter who focuses on campaigns and Congress. As a
reporter for Axios, he won an Emmy Award for his 2020 interview of
then-President Donald J. Trump, and the White House Correspondents’
Association’s Aldo Beckman Award for “overall excellence in White House
coverage” in 2022. @jonathanvswan
Alan Feuer
covers extremism and political violence. He joined The Times in 1999. @alanfeuer
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário