An audio recording of former President Donald J. Trump in 2021 discussing what he called a “highly confidential” document about Iran that he acknowledged he could not declassify because he was out of office appears to contradict his recent assertion that the material he was referring to was simply news clippings.

Portions of a transcript of the two-minute recording of Mr. Trump were cited by federal prosecutors in the indictment of Mr. Trump on charges that he had put national security secrets at risk by mishandling classified documents after leaving office and then obstructing the government’s efforts to retrieve them.

The recording captured his conversation in July 2021 with a publisher and writer working on a memoir by Mr. Trump’s final chief of staff, Mark Meadows. In it, Mr. Trump discussed what he described as a “secret” plan regarding Iran drawn up by Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Defense Department. Mr. Trump was citing the document in rebutting an account that General Milley feared having to keep him from manufacturing a crisis with Iran in the period after Mr. Trump lost his re-election bid in late 2020.

The audio, which is likely to feature as evidence in Mr. Trump’s trial in the documents case, was played for the first time in public on Monday by CNN and was also obtained by The New York Times.

Last week, in an interview with the Fox News host Bret Baier, Mr. Trump insisted that he was not presenting classified material in the meeting, which was recorded at Mr. Trump’s golf club at Bedminster, N.J. Mr. Trump said he was not referring to any “secret” or “highly confidential” documents, but was rather talking about “newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”

But the audio recording of the full encounter suggests that Mr. Trump was referring not to secondhand accounts, but instead to a specific piece of paper, or papers, in front of him.

Joining Mr. Trump at the meeting at Bedminster were those working on an autobiography of Mr. Meadows as well as at least two of Mr. Trump’s own aides. Mr. Trump, in his own narration, seems to brandish or point to what he described to his visitors as a document — described in the indictment as a “plan of attack” — apparently to rebut a story published a week earlier in The New Yorker that described General Milley’s concern that Mr. Trump could launch a strike against Iranian interests that he could use to help create a justification to remain in office.

“Isn’t it amazing?” Trump says as he shuffles through what he calls “a big pile of papers,” which he can be heard handling on the recording.

Read more and listen to audio on NY Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/26/us/politics/trump-documents-tape-audio.html