Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s handling of classified materials have a 2021 recording of Mr Trump discussing a sensitive military document he kept after leaving the White House, two people who the matter had been notified.
In the recording, Mr Trump suggested he knew the document was classified and had not released it, a person briefed on the matter said.
The existence of the recording could undermine Mr Trump’s repeated claim that he had already released material that remained in his possession after he left office. Prosecutors are investigating whether Mr. Trump obstructed efforts by federal officials to recover documents he carried after leaving office and whether he violated laws governing the handling of classified materials.
The existence of the recording was previously reported by DailyExpertNews.
The recording was made during a meeting Mr Trump held in July 2021 with people who helped his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, write a memoir of his 10 months in the White House, according to people briefed on the matter . The meeting was held at Mr. Trump’s club in Bedminster, NJ, where he spends summers.
Until now, the focus of the document search has largely been on material Mr. Trump had with him at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, rather than New Jersey.
Mr. Meadows did not attend the meeting, but at least two of Mr. Trump’s aides did. One, Margo Martin, routinely recorded the interviews he gave for books written about him that year.
On the recording, Mr. Trump began swearing at his hand-picked Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark A. Milley, who was described in media reports at the time as having been wary of Mr. Trump’s attack on Iran in the last days of the war. the presidency, according to those briefed on this.
Mr Trump then began to refer to a document he was carrying, saying it was prepared by General Milley and related to the attack on Iran, people briefed on the matter said. Among other comments, he mentioned his classification skills during the discussion, said a person briefed on the matter. You can hear Mr Trump interacting with paper on the tape, although it is not clear if this was the document in question.
The Justice Department has gotten its hands on the recording in recent months, a potentially key piece in a mountain of evidence prosecutors have amassed under special counsel, Jack Smith, since he was appointed in November to oversee federal investigations into the Mr. Trump.
According to two of the people briefed on the matter, Ms. Martin was asked about the recording during a grand jury appearance.
In an interview with DailyExpertNews on Wednesday night, James Trusty, an attorney representing Trump in the case, indicated that the former president took the position that he had released the material he took with him when he left office.
“When he left for Mar-a-Lago with boxes of documents that other people had packed for him and brought with him, he was the commander-in-chief,” said Mr. Trusty. “There is no question that he has the constitutional authority to be declassified as commander-in-chief.”
Mr Trusty said officials could prove Mr Trump released material. But when asked if Mr. Trump had released the document in question at the Bedminster meeting, Mr. Trusty declined, saying.
In all, the administration has recovered more than 300 documents with secret markings belonging to Mr. Trump since he left office. They include an initial set of documents returned to the National Archives in January last year, another set provided to the Justice Department by Trump’s aides in June, material seized by the FBI in August when searching Mar-a-Lago and found a handful in additional searches late last year.
One set of documents found by the FBI during the search had the highest level of classification, top secret/sensitive classified information.
Mr. Trump has long touted what he believes was his ability to automatically release materials and has even said he could do it with his mind.
His allies have insisted he had a standing order to release material as he moved it from the Oval Office to the White House residence, a claim that several former senior administration officials say is nonsense. Members of his legal team have warned his assistants not to rely too heavily on that argument as a defense in the documents case.
That claim was most articulated by Kash Patel, a close adviser to Mr. Trump, who testified before a grand jury under an immunity deal forced upon him by prosecutors.
The recording obtained by the special counsel’s office could help prosecutors undermine any argument by Mr. Trump that the documents he took with him when he left the White House had been released. It could also help them demonstrate that Mr. Trump was aware that his abilities to possess — and show off — classified material were limited.
In addition, one of the laws cited by the Justice Department in its search for the warrant used last year to search Mar-a-Lago, known as the Espionage Act, was passed by Congress during World War I, decades before President Harry S. Truman an executive order establishing the modern executive classification system.
As a result, the Espionage Act makes no reference to whether a document is considered secret. Instead, it becomes a crime to withhold documents related to national defense without authorization that could be used to harm the United States or aid a foreign adversary.
Detectives have questioned witnesses about General Milley in several interviews for several weeks, though they have generally left unclear what they were looking for.
Investigators have several if not all of the recordings of book interviews Mr Trump gave, according to two of the people familiar with the events.
In an interview, Mr Trump said he had taken “nothing of great urgency” when asked if he had anything in his possession.
Mr. Trump is ambiguous when asked if he ever showed classified documents to people after he left the White House. At a DailyExpertNews event at City Hall in May, he said, “Not really. I would be entitled to it. By the way, they were released afterwards.
Mr. Meadows seemed to echo Mr. Trump’s claim about General Milley in his book.
“The president recalls a four-page report typed by Mark Milley himself,” the book said. “It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, which would involve deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump on more than one occasion during his presidency. President Trump rejected those requests every time.”
But according to a person familiar with the document in question, the report was not written by General Milley and appears to date from an earlier period in the Trump administration, when General Joseph F. Dunford Jr. was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Jim Mattis was the Secretary of Defense.
General Milley has been interviewed by detectives about the matter, according to a person who was aware of the discussion.