On June 8, Donald Trump was indicted on 37 federal counts related to his removal of classified material from the White House after his presidency. For those unfamiliar with the details, this is an adequate enough summary. What matters for the present purposes is that the indictment was an extremely serious one and contained significant evidentiary submissions, including photographs and transcripts of recorded conversations wherein Trump was alleged to have revealed both the existence and some of the contents of classified information to others.
Last night, on CNN, one of those recorded conversations was aired on Anderson Cooper 360. It somehow plays, in its full context, even worse than the excerpts included in the indictment. Per CNN, we find out now that the tape comes from an interview Trump willingly recorded with the two writers working on former chief of staff Mark Meadows’s “autobiography.” (Let that last bit sink in for a moment.) He was in the midst of griping about General Mark Milley, and then to prove his point about how much of a hypocrite Milley is, does something stupid himself: whips out the United States military’s attack plan against Iran in case of war, a document submitted to Trump under Milley’s name as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He then is heard paging through the document, quickly adding “this is off the record” because the documents are “highly confidential, secret . . . this is secret information.” Later, he laments that “as president I could have declassified it, but now I can’t.”
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