The release of an audio recording of statements by ex-US President Donald Trump has sparked debate in the United States. Trump is charged with improper handling of classified government documents. “As President, I could have released them, now I can’t,” Trump said on Monday evening (local time) recording made public by the US broadcaster CNN from 2021 about papers that he apparently shows to interlocutors.
Specifically, it seems to be about a secret Pentagon document on an attack on Iran that Trump is showing around. The existence of the recording was already known – its copy is a central part of the indictment. The media had also reported on the sound recording, which had not yet been published. Trump has repeatedly claimed that classified information was no longer classified after it was taken to his private home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. The recording could undermine Trump’s argument.
Trump calls special counsel ‘mentally deranged’
On the Internet portal “Truth Social”, which he co-founded, Trump described the publication of the recording as electoral influence and part of an “ongoing witch hunt”. He called the Justice Department’s special counsel, Jack Smith, “mentally deranged.” Smith, the Justice Department and the FBI illegally leaked the recording to the press and twisted the facts – in fact, the recording is more of an exoneration for him as an ex-president.
The federal police FBI had searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in August and confiscated numerous classified documents from his tenure, some with the highest classification level. By keeping confidential government documents in private rooms after Trump was in office, he could have made himself liable to prosecution. He was charged in the affair in mid-June and had to appear in person in federal court in Miami. Trump pleaded “not guilty”. It was the first time a former US President had appeared in federal court to face an indictment.