Trumper: ‘Now We Have a Problem’
So said a Trump aide at Bedminster in July 2021. Man, was she right!
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Several media outlets now have a hugely (bigly?) important audio-recording that is a tiny piece of the evidence in the charges against Donald Trump in the Florida matter — what is called in shorthand the “classified documents case.”
I’m linking to a CNN article which contains the audio — and you definitely want to spend the two minutes listening to this one.
Some will find a reference from the indictment (you know which indictment I’m talking about) helpful, from paragraph 6.a., as background:
… a writer, a publisher, and two members of his staff …
a classified document, and Donald Trump — what could possibly go wrong?
So now we can all actually hear what Jack Smith and his team heard while they were drafting the indictment.
It’s pretty stunning, I must say.
For one thing, the recording makes it absolutely clear that Trump was NOT talking about a newspaper or magazine article, or a memo, or anything other than an actual classified document prepared for him by the Department of Defense and Gen. Mark Milley.
That’s not to say that he was not also referring to one or more articles at the time — in particular an article in the New Yorker of July 15, 2021:
To help define the issue a little, here are some Trump quotes from the CNN article (quoting his statements in a FOX interview, where he was trying out different excuses and explanations while twisting and turning in the spotlight):
‘There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,’ Trump said on Fox. “And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper…
