And so another of Trump's lies is exposed. And this one reveals a felony.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, who's investigating Trump's post-presidential retention of classified documents, has obtained an audio recording in which he acknowledged "he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran," reports CNN.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that prior to leaving the White House he declassified all the materials later in his possession. The audio recording shows otherwise. In it, Trump says he would share some of the documents were not for his inability to then declassify records, since he was no longer president.
The recording is from a July 2021 meeting at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey golf club. Attending were two people ghostwriting former chief of staff Mark Meadows' autobiography and aides to the former president. They lacked the necessary security clearances for access to the information discussed.
At the meeting, Trump falsely claimed that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, had urged him to launch a large-scale attack on Iran before departing office.
Meadows’ autobiography attempts to support this fabrication. It includes the passage, "[Trump] recalls a four-page report typed up by Mark Milley himself. It contained the general’s own plan to attack Iran, deploying massive numbers of troops, something he urged President Trump to do more than once during his presidency."
Trump's 2021 claim was in angry response to a New Yorker piece by Susan Glasser, in which she reported that "Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to insure that Trump did not embark on a military conflict with Iran" (emphasis added). The Joint Chiefs chairman, wrote Glasser, "was worried that Trump might set in motion a full-scale conflict that was not justified."
Yet at the Bedminster meeting, Trump asserted that in his possession was a document from Milley that he would show everyone in the room, if only it had been declassified. The document, he contended, "would undermine what Milley was saying," according to CNN's sources. "One source says Trump refers to the document as if it is in front of him ... [and] the recording captures the sound of paper rustling, as if Trump was waving the document around."
That such a document exists is not in doubt. The Pentagon has contingency plans for every conceivable situation on the planet. Trump's fabrication lay in claiming that Milley had urged the attack.
In fact, the Pentagon chief had worried about two "nightmare scenarios," one of which involved Iran. In her New Yorker piece, Glasser observed that the first entailed Trump attempting "to use the military on the streets of America to prevent the legitimate, peaceful transfer of power." The second was a Trumped-up war with Iran, which he would exploit as a military emergency to remain in office.
Continued Glasser: "Milley believed that the nation had come close—'very close'—to conflict with the Islamic Republic. This dangerous post-election period, Milley said, was all because of Trump’s 'Hitler'-like embrace of the 'Big Lie' that the election had been stolen from him; Milley feared it was Trump’s 'Reichstag moment,' in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it."
Whatever Trump's lies were about Gen. Milley, they are non-prosecutable. But Special Counsel Smith now has Trump on tape admitting he had non-declassified documents in his possession, which destroys his previous assertions. And that is prosecutable.
As David Frum noted early last month in The Atlantic: "It’s not inconceivable that Trump could be wearing an ankle bracelet when and if he delivers his acceptance address at the Republican National Convention." Something in dark blue, please.