effort. the chairman secretly feared trump would insist on launching a strike on iranian interests and it could setoff a full-blown war. so general milley was worried president trump would use the pretext of a warul with iran to stay in power, which is i guess one way to doch it. now, that war obviously never came tono pass. instead trump pulled many other insane levers to stay in the white house, but this new yorker story washe a big deal. trump was apparently furious. the summer the new yorker article came out trump was so enraged by general milley that trump even released a statement. if i was going to do a coup one of the last people i would want to do it with was general mark milley. if i was going to do a coup.
declassify just by saying it is declassified. even by thinking about it. reporter: but sources tell cnn on this recording trump claims to still be in possession of a pentagon document, suggests he would like to share it, and then acknowledges the limits of his ability to declassify it, all of this undercutting his own defense. asked if he had ever shared any information at cnn s town hall not really. i would have the right to. by the way what do you mean not really? not that i can think of. let me tell you, i have the right do whatever i want with them. reporter: the summer 2021 recording comes out of trump s new jersey golf club, now the second confirmed state where he has had classified information after the fbi walked out ofof h mar-a-lago state with boxes of top documents. trump continuing to say the doj s interference is shameful
documents in front of people, which is not what you re supposed to do with classified documents. we don t know for sure exactly what trump was rustling in that recording. it could have been a plan to attack iran from the joint chiefs or it could have been a random piece of paper used as a prop.s either way trump seems very comfortable talking about these documents, even waving them around in front of a group of people who do not have the proper security clearance. and finally, the third thing we learn from this reporting is that trump knew that the document in his possession was still classified. on the recording trump clearly understood that he could not show this document to the people in the room with him because he knew he actually did not classify that document as president. all of this matters a lot. throughout the entire mar-a-lago saga, trump and his lawyers have tried out severals lines of defense. first they claimed trump did not
reports about this audio recording are accurate, it may be the most damning evidence yet in the special counsel s documents investigation because this alleged reporting tells us three really important things before now. number one, donald trump clearly knew he had classified documents in his possession after he left the white house. at the time of that recording, the national archives had already repeatedly asked trump to return all white house documents. the head of nara had written and pleaded in an e-mail to trump s lawyer a few months prior that it was absolutely necessary that we obtain an account for all presidential records. but now here we have trump on tape talking to strangers about classified documents that he says he has making no mention of the fact that, oh, by the way, the federal government would like them back, please mr. president. okay. now, the second thing we learned from this reporting is that trump may well have been waving around thosebe classified
i will just say, yes, we do have tapes of the recordings that phil ruck, where my colleague and i made our interview with donald trump for our book which came out at precisely this time in july of 2021 when the former president was complaining about mark milley. and i will say that it was the pattern and practice of former president donald trump to also tape record any media people that were coming tome visit him. he wanted a record to fact check and make sure nothing was taken out of context that he said. and the irony here is that researchers who sat down with him foro mark meadows book ha the former president s own words in which, you know, they didn t misquote him, and they have evidence and now also we know trump s a aide, marco, also has the recording and evidence in