following his indictment the former president told fox he s breath bear that he didn t actually have that documents, it was a pile of papers, magazine clippings but there for the first time you can hear him saying these are the papers, that s a quote not included in the indictment or our previous reporting and it undercuts this argument that what he s shuffling through is a bunch of random documents. ultimately it is expected to be up to a jury to decide what exactly they re hearing here. really stunning audio. paula reid, thank you so much. jim? all right. joining me now to talk more about this cnn anchor of inside politics, dana bash. let s set aside the legal consequences of this given what the president said on tape. speak just politically for a moment here because the president speaking at a minimum dismissively about highly sensitive documents, which he describes as such and sort of makes jokes about it as his staff laughs along with him
stories, magazine clippings, but it sure does not sound like he s talking about a magazine article there. is it clear to you, does it sound to you like he is holding a classified document? well it sounds like he s holding something. . i don t know what it was, i think in earlier, it was reported sometime ago that it was a four page document, which would not have been what d. o. d. typically prepared. but we usually prepared was a one pager that included targeting options, and escalatory measures. things like that i outline in my memoir clearly. that would be unusual, but something like that would be a documents that would generate that wow effect, that but people who are unfamiliar with these types of things, or classified material. when you were defense secretary, and you talk about the experience that you too had, and obviously you work, to them a lot did you ever have concerns about how he handled classified information? were you ever worry to leave anything with him? or have to
when you hadn t. but before i send boxes over i have to take all of my things out. these boxes were interspersed with all sorts of things, golf shirts, clothing, pants, shoes. there were many things. so what you re saying, man, is that you obstructed the fbi and the national archives because you re basically a hoarder and therefore you co mingled classified documents containing our national defense and nuclear secrets with your shoes, golf clubs, bunch of magazine clippings and stuff? what? look, we all know by now that trump supporters do not care that trump openly admitted to breaking the law. we get it. it s actually easier for them to believe that brett baier was colluing with the department of justice to trap poor mr. trump into telling the truth. for most of the folks living in the real world, however, monday night s admission was not some
sitting attorney general for governor because josh is at least a mainstream individual and a decent human being, and that s why we re backing him, but so i think there s a real problem and i don t know that anything donald trump denied is going to correct the issues or the problems that mastriano has. he doesn t have the capacity to move back to the center or try to appeal to more moderate voters. in fact, he s doubled down on where he is, so this is i m not sure what the point of this is. going into wilkes-barre an area trump had done very well. obama won that county, and of course donald trump won it in 16. so keep a close eye on this county. i m not sure this is the best place to do this rally. and al, i mean, a federal judge unsealed an inventory of the highly sensitive government documents that trump had at mar-a-lago, and it revealed that classified documents were mixed in with clothes, gifts, magazine clippings. there are also questions about empty folders that were found,
highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records and otherwise unproperly identified. now, unfoldered, new word for me, but basically these highly classified documents in their folders had been taken out, thrown amongst other pieces of paper. is there any scenario on planet earth where documents like this would just be thrown asunder with other magazine clippings and stories about trump, highly classified documents what would any sort of honest rational be for why that would happen? none. just to be clear, there s no rational for anybody who is aware of the existence of the documents. and that s why the location of them and the amount the long period of time that is laid out by the department of justice in this filing that they and the