Former President Donald Trump acknowledged the documents he had in his possession were classified in newly obtained audio by CNN released late Monday night.
The tape was recorded on July 21, 2021, at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club. Trump was indicted on 37 federal charges and pled not guilty to all counts. While the recording has been mentioned previously, this is the first time it has been heard publicly.
Fwrd Axis News has been able to confirm the authenticity of the recording from another source who has also heard the audio in full.
On the recording, Trump is heard attacking his Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley and is heard shuffling papers before he referenced a document that Trump later would say is still top secret.
“Well, with Milley — uh, let me see that, I’ll show you an example,” Trump says on the recording. “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. 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.”
“Wait a minute, let’s see here. I just found, isn’t that amazing?” Trump says. “This totally wins my case, you know. Except it is like, highly confidential. Secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this. This was done by the military and given to me. As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t.”
The audio recording was first published by CNN.
The Trump campaign released a statement claiming the audio proves that the former president is innocent of all charges before shifting blame to the media and Democrats.
The audio tape provides context proving, once again, that President Trump did nothing wrong at all. The president is speaking rhetorically and also quite humorously,” a Trump campaign spokesperson said.
The audio contradicts an interview that Trump gave to Fox News last week, where he denied the documents he had were classified.
“I didn’t have a document, per se,” Trump said. “There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories, and articles.”
