CNN published a recording of Donald Trump showing biographers classified documents that he took from the White House when he left in 2021.
“These are the papers,” Trump says in the tape, talking about Gen. Mark Milley. It's a quote, CNN remarks, was not in the indictment.
Trump and his aide then cracked jokes about former Sec. Hillary Clinton, whom Trump said he would "lock up" because she had classified information on her email server at home.
“Hillary would print that out all the time, you know. Her private emails,” Trump’s staffer said.
Speaking to the Fox News network about the transcript after it was released, Trump swore it was all fake news. “There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”
Bradley Moss, MSNBC legal analyst, referred back to the interview explaining after hearing the audio, "This wasn’t newspaper articles. He has the document right there. He is talking about how DoD presented it to him."
The tape appears to negate that claim.
"CNN has the Trump tape where he bragged about and showed off a classified battle plan for invading Iran — and that he KNEW it was classified and he shouldn’t have it," legal analyst Tristan Snell tweeted. "This is like the Access Hollywood tape, except here Trump was assaulting America’s national security."
Taking to Twitter on Monday evening as the news broke, political pundits and legal analysts flocked to give their observations and how it will likely impact the public perception of Trump's documents trial.
"Key evidence for the prosecution in the trial of Donald J Trump. The defendant in his own words — essentially narrating his crime," tweeted Just Security's Ryan Goodman.
"Remember, we already knew that the August 11 Bedminster tape was instrumental in the government’s decision to charge Trump in a document’s case. Now that we hear it, it’s more obvious why that was," LA Times legal analyst Harry Litman tweeted. He later remarked that "the jury will hear [it] whether or not Trump testifies." He also called it "devastating."
"This recording is as close to a smoking gun as you can get. This proves willfulness," said recent GW University graduate Aaron Parnas.
Adam Smith, who serves as the VP at CREW (Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington) tweeted: "I appreciate the criminal simplicity of 'these are the papers.'"
Some, like Katie Phang, said simply, "this is so bad for Trump."
