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It’s taken a few days, but Donald Trump appears to be zeroing in on something resembling an explanation, sort of, for the newly released audio in which he allegedly shows off a classified Iran attack plan at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The former president’s reasoning makes absolutely no sense.
“I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth, it was bravado,” Trump told Semafor and ABC News on Tuesday. “I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.”
What were these papers, then, if there weren’t classified documents?
“I had a whole desk full of lots of papers — mostly newspaper articles, copies of magazines, copies of different plans, copies of stories, having to do with many, many subjects,” he told Fox News earlier on Tuesday. “What was said was absolutely fine and very perfectly. We did nothing wrong.” Trump added that the “plans” he had were “building plans” and “plans of a golf course.”
“I’m a legitimate person,” the former president said.
The problem with all of this is that Trump is explicit on the recording that he is brandishing something “secret” that was given to him by the Defense Department. It’s pretty clear it was an attack plan against Iran, as the Justice Department has alleged, because Trump pulls it out as he gripes that Gen. Mark Milley accused him of wanting to attack Iran. “This was him,” he says. “They presented me this. … This wasn’t done by me, this was him.”
Trump then points out that what he is showing those present is “highly confidential” before admitting “as president I could have declassified it, but now I can’t.”
Trump has long been trotting out bullshit explanations for his behavior in the hopes that the media would eventually move on to the next thing. The media may very well do that here, but this time Trump has also been criminally charged. There will presumably be a trial, and his legal team will have to explain the gaping discrepancy between what Trump said on tape and what Trump is saying now to a jury.
The Bedminster tape also doesn’t bode well for the argument that the boxes of classified documents were stored out of sight and out of mind at Mar-a-Lago, and that Trump barely knew what was in them. The Washington Post reported Tuesday night that Trump was “personally attached to and hyper-aware of the boxes, instructing that at least some of them accompany him from place-to-place, and appeared aware of what was inside,” citing the former president’s advisers familiar with the matter, who added that he regularly transported boxes to and from New Jersey.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that investigators were so concerned that Trump’s club in Bedminster may be stocked with classified documents that they mulled raiding it. The Justice Department ultimately decided it didn’t have probable cause to secure a warrant.
