Washington The Defense Department memo on Iran at the heart of the now-public audio recording that captured a July 2021 meeting with former President Donald Trump isn’t part of the 31 counts of willful retention of public defense information charged in special counsel Jack Smith’s charge of the former chairman, a source familiar with the matter verified to CBS News.
In the recording of the meeting at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey golf club, the former chairman can be heard supposedly showing and agitating what he described as” largely nonpublic, secret” documents with helpers. Sources say the documents were related to plans for a implicitU.S. attack on Iran.
” It’s like largely nonpublic, secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump said in the audio tape recording attained by CBS News.” See, as chairman I could have declassified, but now I can’t, you know Is not that intriguing? It’s so cool.”
The document and recording are described in the charge Smith’s platoon secured against Trump before this month, reported as an alleged meeting with” a pen, a publisher, and two members of” Trump’s staff,” none of whom held a security concurrence.”
But according to a source familiar with the matter, Trump wasn’t charged with unlawfully holding onto the Iran- related document bandied in the recording.
Smith’s 37- count charge against Trump includes 31 charges of consciously retaining public defense information. It generally outlines each of the 31 classified records that prosecutors purport Trump immorally kept, without naming the exact subject matter. The Iran memo isn’t part of the list of the 31 records in the charge, the source said.
Throughout the times-long civil disquisition into Trump’s White House records, investigators have collected further than 300 documents with classified markings on them including 103 seized during the prosecution of a hunt leave at Trump’s Florida hearthstone last time.
Multiple sources familiar with the disquisition preliminarily told CBS News that defense attorneys weren’t certain the Iran memo in question was ever recovered and returned to the government. Still, the 2021 incident is one of two cases substantiated in the charge, in which Smith describes Trump allegedly showing public defense information to individualities without proper concurrence.
Trump can be heard in the audio supposedly admitting he’d a sensitive record after he left office and no longer had the power to declassify it.
On Tuesday, Fox News asked Trump about the recording and he claimed he” did nothing wrong.”
” My voice was fine,” Trump told Fox News.” What did I say wrong in those recordings? I did not indeed see the recording. All I know is I did nothing wrong. We had a lot of papers, a lot of papers piled up. In fact, you could hear the howl of the paper. And nothing said I did anything wrong.”
And in another interview, Trump told Semafor and ABC News that he didn’t have any sensitive records, calling his discussion captured on the recording” bravado.”” I just held up a whole pile of — my office is loaded up with papers. I’ve papers from 25 different effects,” he said.
The actuality of the audio tape recording and the July 2021 meeting was first reported by CNN, which was also first to gain a recording of the discussion.
Sources familiar with the matter said that the discussion of the allegedly classified document arose as Trump was talking about Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley, who had been portrayed in a story in The New Yorker as having fought in the last days of the Trump administration to keep the chairman from attacking Iran.
In the recording of the meeting, the former chairman tells those with him the document discredited any review against him.
Smith’s office declined to note.
before this month, Trump contended not shamefaced to a aggregate of 37 counts, which included conspiracy to obstruct justice. Prosecutors purport he and an assistant, Waltine Nauta, worked to move boxes containing classified records throughout Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
Nauta was set to be arraigned in a Miami civil court on Tuesday, but flight troubles and difficulty securing original legal counsel delayed the hail until coming week.artical source cbs
