(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) A classified memorandum allegedly outlining Gen. Mark Milley’s plans to invade Iran that was referenced in a leaked audio recording of former President Donald Trump was not listed among the records for which Trump was recently indicted—and may not exist at all, CBS reported.
The Justice Department is suspected of leaking the much-hyped audio recording, which reportedly captured a July 2021 meeting at which Trump showed highly confidential documents to aides relating to a potential attack of Iran.
“It is like highly confidential, secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump said in the recording, which CNN first released on Monday. “See, as president I could have declassified, but now I can’t, you know. . . Isn’t that interesting? It’s so cool.”
The DOJ’s indictment does, in fact, make vague reference to the recording, with the name of the country having been redacted. That led, initially, to speculation that it could be China.
But out of the 31 counts of willful retention of national defense information charged in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump, the document allegedly shared by the former president is nowhere to be found.
According to CBS, it is possible that the Iran memo was never recovered during the FBI’s controversial raid last year on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
On Tuesday, after the recordings had been released, Trump appeared on Fox News, reasserting his position that he “did nothing wrong” in retaining previously classified materials under the Presidential Records Act.
The current frontrunner for the GOP 2024 presidential nomination also denied that the leaked audio offered any sort of smoking-gun evidence, either in the court of public opinion or elsewhere.
“My voice was fine,” Trump said. “What did I say wrong in those recordings? I didn’t even see the recording. All I know is I did nothing wrong.”
He called the conversation on record “bravado,” suggesting that he was overstating the importance of the documents in question.
“We had a lot of papers, a lot of papers stacked up,” he said. “In fact, you could hear the rustle of the paper. And nobody said I did anything wrong.”
Trump previously suggested that he was showing people newspaper clippings.
“There was no document,” Trump told Fox News anchor Bret Baier last week.
“I didn’t have a document per se,” he continued. “There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”
