Former President Donald Trump is offering an explanation for an audio recording where he’s heard talking about a plan to attack Iran.
At a meeting in 2021, Trump is heard claiming to hold a “confidential” and “secret” document from former Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley.
“I just found — isn’t that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know, except it is like highly confidential, secret,” he says, followed by laughter.
Media outlets have reported the audio is a key part of the indictment in the government’s case against Trump for allegedly mishandling classified material. But CBS News reports the alleged Iran memo is actually not among the records underlying charges in the Trump indictment.
He told ABC News, “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.”
The former president told the outlet that he had a lot of papers on his desk, and none of them were classified.
“My desk is loaded up with papers. I have papers from 25 different things. … Look, look what I have. You see I have all different stuff interspersed with newspapers. There’s no highly, highly classified documents in there,” Trump said,
When ABC News asked what documents he was holding up when the recording was made, Trump said they were magazine articles.
“Some of those stories would have been on Iran because it’s a very close subject and because I think it could be the end of the world. And I’d hold them up and I said, ‘You can’t let this stuff happen.’ But that was not documents and it wasn’t classified,” he said.
The former president faces 37 counts related to his handling of classified documents, including obstruction of justice. He pleaded not guilty to all charges earlier this month.
A Trump campaign spokesman said the audio recording, which first aired Monday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” “provides context proving, once again, that President Trump did nothing wrong at all.” And Trump, on his social media platform late Monday, claimed the recording “is actually an exoneration, rather than what they would have you believe.”
Trump Leads Biden in Latest Poll, White House Pushes ‘Bidenomics’
Meanwhile, Trump appears to have gotten a bump in the latest polls for the 2024 presidential race.
Although polls have repeatedly shown President Biden leading former President Trump, a new survey from Morning Consult has Trump ahead with 44% to Biden’s 41%.
But there’s a long way to go, with the election still nearly a year and a half away, and Trump still faces other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination.
The poll also comes as Biden makes a speech Wednesday in Chicago on the economy, trying to convince the public that it’s doing very well.
However, a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs survey showed that only 33% approve of the president’s leadership on the economy.
On Tuesday, White House deputy press secretary Olivia Dalton told reporters Biden’s economic policies are “incredibly popular” with Americans as they start to “feel the impact” of his agenda, according to Fox News.
Social media users questioned and ridiculed Dalton’s assertion about the president’s handling of the economy.
“Like 26 straight months of negative real weekly wage growth???” economist Tony Sanders said.
“Thinking that if your economic agenda takes 2.5 years to be felt, then that agenda is a failure,” RedState writer Bonchie responded on Twitter.
“‘The president’s economic policies are incredibly popular!’ Oh, that’s why his poll numbers are so low,” another Twitter user quipped.
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