investigator reporter and bob woodward of the former president. some of it was played on cnn earlier today but what you ll hear tonight has never aired. from 2016 through 2020 woodward taped his conversations with the former president. he will be releasing all 20 of these conversations on the 25th of this month as an audio book titled the trump tapes which runs for more than eight hours. cnn has obtained a copy and what you ll hear tonight is striking. it speaks to who he was as president, who he is as a person and how completely intertwined the personal and presidential were for him and probably still are. something that s not just apparent in what he says but even more so in how he says it. something the printed word just can t fully convey. the conversations also speak directly to some of what the former president is now being investigated for. namely how he views classified material and a president s responsibility for safe guarding some of the countries deepest secrets a
with bob woodward. the letters, yes. nobody else has them but i want i don t you to treat them with president. i understand. and don t say i gave them to you. okay. i think it s okay. normally i wouldn t have i wasn t going to give them to bob. what you make a photo of them. no, i dictated them into a tape recorder. really? i mean, okay. bob, don t tell anybody. photo stat, dictating it, it s quite a scene. but the reality is this is the kind of incident where national security advisers to trump their heads are exploding. these are not letters letters from heads of state should not be handed off to reporters. these are letters that we know that he likes to
it was, i am sure, at the time an effort to try to remove the president from this meeting. in fact he ends up dictating it, and who knows whether that s to try to save his son, perhaps, because initially it was supposed to have been his son s statemt. to say it s a mistake, swear to god it s a mistake, rudy wasn t there, this sounds to me like an after-the-fact correction. and let me just say, i mean, we know this president is an inveterate liar. as of this week the fact checker has 3,251 lies so far. but this isn t really about just lying, because he s lying 6.5 times a day. it is about what that lie was intended to do. and it s further evidence of trying to zhush over, to cover %-p
let s look at the portrait of the president that we know. this is a president who takes his publish relations into his own hands. the notion that someone would come to one of the president s staffers with a piece of juicy information that was later going to appear on fox, and a staffer would not have transmitted that to the president, that does not comport with what we know in the reporting over the past months about the way he communicates with his communication staff. sean spicer at the end of every day, when he was press secretary, would sit across from the president and give hmm a download of what happened that day. so the notion that the president was, you know, tactfully moving in and out of the edits of don jr. s statement instead of dictating it, we don t know what went down as far as the narrative, but it doesn t comport with his behavior in the past, taking full control of this stuff himself. and also before you all go, all of you have either covered
it. duis motivate people to get help and face the problems of their lives every day. we find that socially acceptable. when dennis goes on a bing and makes a fool of himself and doesn t really respect the situation he has been put in, it is his alcoholism that s dictating it. he needs treatment. he needs to stop drinking. he has known it for years. he can t stop. he hasn t had consequence enough to motivate him to stop. i guess i still don t rely know if i believe that this is about the drinking, because i ve watched dennis rodman over the la last 20 years. it just sounded like he was den miss rodman. how am i to believe this is not about alcohol but about saving dennis rodman, what image he might have left? that s the thing. he has become a character of