Trump Says Recording of Him Discussing Iran Attack Plan Exonerates Him

Former President Donald J. Trump speaks during the Faith and Freedom Road to Majority conference at Hilton in Washington on June 24, 2023. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times

Former President Donald Trump is arguing that he is exonerated by a recently published audio recording that purports to show him describing military planning documents from his presidency with a writer and publisher.

CNN first aired an audio recording on Monday night in which it sounds as though Trump is describing military planning for an attack on Iran. Elements of the audio recording appear to match up with a segment of Jack Smith’s federal indictment (pdf) against Trump, which describes a July 2021 meeting between Trump, the writer, the publisher, and two members of his staff, where they discussed a plan of attack on another country.

In the audio recording shared with CNN, Trump identifies Iran as the country for which the attack plan was drafted and alleges Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley was the one who formulated the attack plan. CNN reported the recording took place in the context of the writer and publisher interviewing Trump while gathering details for a memoir of former Trump White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

The Audio Recording

It’s not clear precisely when in July of 2021 the alleged conversation between Trump and the writer and publisher took place.

On July 15, several news media outlets began to publish excerpts of the book “I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year” by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker. Those book excerpts included claims that Milley feared Trump would attempt a coup or start a war with Iran in order to stay in office after the 2020 election.

Trump denied the coup allegations and lambasted Milley in a July 15 press statement. The audio recording that CNN obtained and aired appears to have been a continuation of Trump’s efforts to dispute the Iran attack allegations circulating in the press at the time.

“[Milley] said that I wanted to attack Iran, isn’t it amazing? I have a big pile of papers; this thing just came up,” Trump can be heard saying in the audio recording. “Look. This was him. They presented me this—this is off-the-record—but they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him. We looked at some—this was him. This wasn’t done by me, this was him. All sorts of stuff, pages long, look.”

The sound of papers shuffling can be heard in the recording before an unidentified speaker says “Oh my gosh.”

“I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know,” Trump says in the audio recording. “Except it is, like, highly confidential, secret, this is secret information. Look. Look at this, you attack, and”

As Trump continued to discuss the documents with the writer and publisher, Trump says, “These are the papers ... this was done by the military and given to me. I think we can probably, right?”

An unnamed speaker then says, “I don’t know, we‘ll have to see, we’ll have to try to”

“Declassify it,” Trump interrupts.

“Figure out a, yeah,” the unnamed speaker continues.

“See, as president I could have declassified it, now I can’t, but this is still a secret,” Trump says.

The Special Counsel Case

The July 2021 audio recording is briefly described in Smith’s Special Counsel indictment against Trump. Trump faces 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information and additional counts for obstructing investigations and withholding documents from officials attempting to retrieve them.

Trump has repeatedly claimed he declassified documents that he took from the White House during and after his presidency, including the documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort that form the basis for the federal indictment.

Prosecutors could present the audio recording at trial and argue that it shows Trump hadn’t declassified all the documents in his possession and that he showed those documents to people who lacked security clearances to view them.

In an interview with Fox News last week, host Bret Baier referenced the audio recording as it was described in the federal indictment. Trump denied having any specific Iran document.

“Bret, there was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else, talking about Iran and other things,” Trump told Baier. “And it may have been held up or may not. That was not a document. I didn’t have any document per se. There was nothing to declassify, these were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles.”

“The Deranged Special Prosecutor, Jack Smith, working in conjunction with the DOJ & FBI, illegally leaked and ’spun' a tape and transcript of me which is actually an exoneration, rather than what they would have you believe,” Trump said in a post on his Truth social media account on Monday night. “This continuing Witch Hunt is another ELECTION INTERFERENCE Scam. They are cheaters and thugs!”

NTD News reached out to one of the attorneys representing Trump in the special counsel case but he declined to comment.

From NTD News