republican nomination. ask he vows to carry on his campaign no matter what prosecutors allege. this exclusive new cnn reporting is this. special counsel jack smith has in his possession an audio record ing in which trump is heard saying he held on to a classified document. that s a giant contradiction from the public assertion he never took anything classified or he can declassify whatever he wants. the tape captures the meeting at trump s golf club. sources say people at that meeting did not have high level security clearances. in the room, trump admits to keeping a memo details an iran attack plan. cnn has not listened to the tape, but sources described it in extensive second by second detail. according to sources, you can even hear the sound of paper rustling ask laughter as if the former president was waving the document around to those in the room. legal analysis in a moment. let s get out to jeff zeleny in
his reporters and people writing books. on this tape trump says he has a classified pentagon document describing a possible attack on iran. we re also told you can hear paper rustling. it appears he might be waving something around. it s unclear if he s waving this document he s referring to or waving something else. perhaps more importantly for investigators, on this reporting you can hear trump suggest he would like to share this information with the people he s speaking with, but he acknowledges that there are limits on his power to declassify post presidency. as one source told me, that s a real problem. that s a real problem because it upped cuts his entire argument. kaitlyn, what are investigators doing about this? they have this recording. that is a crucial piece of evidenced we re told is quite important. many people have said it s very
prosecutors. we know you can hear paper rustling on this recording. we know there are people laughing in the background. i m told this is about two minutes long and it pertains to iran. it s part of a much longer reporting that prosecutors have. the reason, jake, it s significant is that trump seems to indicate on this tape, as he s speaking with those gathered with him at his new jersey club, that he cannot show it to him. he took something that s a classified document and he s limited in his post presidency ability to declassify something which would undercut the argument he s been making. kaitlan, you specifically asked donald trump about his handling of classified documents. let s play a little of that. you have the presidential records act. i was there and i took what i took. did you ever show classified documents to anyone? not really. i would have the right to. by the way
trump in a tizzy. it was reported that general milley repeatedly argued against striking iran and was concerned that trump might set in motion a full-scale conflict not justified. milley and others talked trump out of such a drastic action. on the recording in response to the story, trump brings up the documents which he says came from milley. trump told us that if he could show it to people, it would undermine what milley was saying. one source says trump refer to the document as if it is in front of him. several sources say the recording captures the sound of paper rustling as if trump was waving the document around. there is also laughter in the room. and because it is trump, it could have been the lunch menu, right? it could have been something else. but again this pattern of being angry at somebody who he thought should have been loyal to him played out over esper was
that millie had a plan to attack iran in these conversations. and then he starts waving around paper, and you can hear sort of paper rustling on these recordings and says if i could show you these documents, it would prove that milley is not telling the truth when he said he had no such intention of planning an attack on iran. that is sort of the staging of all of this. talk a little bit about donald trump. is it plausible, in your mind, that the thing he s waving around is the real classified documents that he pinched from mar-a-lago, having pinched them from the white house, or that he s just, you know, profiling, trying to have swagger but that it s not the documents. well, joy, this would be classic donald. oh, look what i have. and he s done this with photographs and other evidence to be people over the years. in the case of general milley, it s quite clear that general milliwould not be in favor of