into court. vladimir putin claims his army just stopped a civil war. a speech filled with pomp and pageantry. an effort, it seems, to project strength, but this morning, the mystery deepens. where is the man who launched the revolt. the stages are set for a major 2024 rivalry test. desantis and trump holding dueling events in new hampshire today. those stories and many more all coming in on cnn news central. donald trump in his own words and on tape. a tape that we know prosecutors leaned on in making their indictment. a tape that undercuts donald trump s publicly stated defense. but will it be allowed in court? cnn has exclusively obtained an audio recording of the 2021 meeting at the former president s golf club in new jersey. on it, you can hear papers rustling as donald trump talks about having highly secret documents. and also talking about how he knows he did not declassify them. i just isn t that amazing? this totally wins my case, you know. except it is like
May well looks like at the moment he was on board. and you can see from the pictures, nobody walked away from that fireball. russia s air transport ministry i believe also speaking out. there s this wagner-linked social media channel that s announced that prigozhin is dead. would that be a more official confirmation at this point? reporter: no, it s unfortunately it s not official. there s lots of pro-wagner telegram channels out there that are saying that prigozhin is dead. and they re saying that he was killed by traitors inside russia. that s pretty ominous, worrying for the situation that they follow this event, if this is the killing of yevgeny prigozhin. but what we ve not heard yet is anything from wagner itself or from concord which is the sort of umbrella group that runs wagner that prigozhin ran. and he himself, you know, said, look, you should only trust what concord says.
Petersburg, russia, and have known each other since the 1990s when prigozhin ran a big catering business. big contracts from the kremlin earned him the nickname of putin s chef, leading him to join the ranks of the country s wealthy oligarchs. he then went on to find the w wagner group, known for its brutal tactics. operating outside russia s military structure, yet fully in support of russia s interests around the world. cnn has tracked wagner mercenaries in so many places. the central african republic in sudan, in libya, in mozambique, in syria definitely, and also now, of course, in ukraine. that critical relationship saw a big shift, though, in just the last few months, when prigozhin began openly criticizing russia s military leaders on their war effort in ukraine. those critiques turned into a