Bada bing! And just like that, the biggest takeaway from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment against former President Donald Trump appears to be falling apart.
Network coverage of Trump’s indictment typically begins with photos of storage boxes piled high in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, a bedroom, an office, and even a ballroom – all of which ostensibly contain highly classified government documents unlawfully removed by the former president when he left the White House.
Next, viewers are told about a July 2021 meeting held at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where Trump met with a writer, a publisher, and two staffers, to discuss a forthcoming autobiography of Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff. Aside from Trump, none of the individuals present had security clearances. At one point, Trump allegedly waved around a Pentagon document that detailed a hypothetical attack on Iran. The indictment features a transcript of this conversation.
We learned about this meeting and the recording’s existence one week before the indictment was unsealed because this information had been leaked to CNN.
The network reported that Meadow’s autobiography “includes an account of what appears to be the same meeting, during which Trump recalls a four-page report typed up by [Trump’s former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Mark Milley himself. 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.”
But CNN’s sources denied Milley had been the author of the report.
The Bedminster meeting came shortly after an excerpt from a new book by the New Yorker’s Susan Glasser had been published. Glasser, who had interviewed Milley, wrote that in the final days of the Trump administration, Milley tried to prevent Trump from attacking Iran. Considering that Trump aborted a June 2019 retaliatory strike on Iran after they had shot down a U.S. surveillance drone because he was concerned about civilian casualties, I’m highly skeptical that he was interested in attacking Iran in the last month of his presidency. At any rate, Trump was very unhappy with Milley at the time which was why his name had come up.
On Monday night, CNN reported they’d obtained a recording from the meeting which “includes new details from the conversation that is a critical piece of evidence in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump over the mishandling of classified information, including a moment when Trump seems to indicate he was holding a secret Pentagon document with plans to attack Iran.”
Trump is heard saying, “It is like highly confidential, secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this. … See, as president I could have declassified, but now I can’t, you know…Isn’t that interesting? It’s so cool.”
Citing Trump’s widely watched interview with Fox News host Bret Baier last week, CNN concluded that the recording of Trump “saying ‘these are the papers’ and referring to something he calls ‘highly confidential’ and seems to be showing others in the room, could undercut the former president’s claims.”
Then again, it may not.
Trump told Baier, “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.”
After all the predictions of Trump’s political demise, CBS News reported on Tuesday night that a source had confirmed the Pentagon document “is not part of the 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information charged in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of the former president.”
According to the source, “Trump was not charged with unlawfully holding onto the Iran-related document discussed in the recording.”
Asked about the recording during a Tuesday interview with Semafor, Trump replied, “I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth, 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.”
Frankly, it’s easy to imagine Trump waving papers in front of a small group of people for dramatic effect and telling them it’s a classified Pentagon document.
It’s starting to look as if Smith’s case is far less solid than previously thought. If Trump truly was waving around newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles as he claimed, and if this is the most “damning” evidence Smith has against the former president, he’s on slippery ground indeed.
A previous version of this article appeared in The Washington Examiner.
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