Donald Trump was already facing a serious legal dilemma. As stevebenen writes, new reporting about a behind-the-scenes recording makes matters vastly worse for the former president.
“Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump reportedly at one point, according to the transcript. “This was done by the military and given to me.”
“Well, with Milley — uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example. He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t that amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was him,” Trump added. “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.
The former president reportedly went on to say, “All sorts of stuff — pages long, look. Wait a minute, let’s see here. I just found, isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this.” But it’s these 10 words that I keep staring at: “As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t.”
In other words, if this reporting is accurate, Trump realized he’d kept sensitive documents related to national security; recognized the security concerns; shared “highly confidential” information anyway; and undermined his own absurd “declassification” defense with explicit rhetoric about the limits on what he could do as a former president.This post revises our
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