Nearly 10 months after the FBI recovered more than 100 classified documents from Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, there have been no federal charges against the former president, but we’re learning more about what the special counsel is looking at.
The 2021 audio tape of Trump acknowledging he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, which CNN reported exclusively on Wednesday, is a key example. The recording – which also captures the sound of paper rustling, several sources told CNN – undermines all the arguments from Trump about his retention of classified documents after leaving the White House. (Trump, who has denied all wrongdoing, said in a Fox News town hall on Thursday that he didn’t “know anything about” the meeting that CNN has reported is on the tape.)
I talked to CNN’s Senior Crime and Justice Reporter Katelyn Polantz, part of the reporting team that uncovered the existence of the 2021 recording, about why these new developments are so important and why the federal investigation is taking so long.
The main takeaway for me: prosecutors must determine if classified information meets a sort of Goldilocks test. In other words, it must be clearly secret enough to convince a jury that sharing it jeopardized national security, but not so secret that the government cannot allow a jury to hear about it.
It’s not clear where a war plan for attacking Iran would fall.
What do we think this tape means?
WOLF: How do these developments – and the existence of the audio tape we’ve heard about but not heard – affect Trump’s larger legal issues?
POLANTZ: First of all, it’s an audio tape that the Justice Department has, which is a big deal on its own because an audio tape is evidence. And from all of the former prosecutors we’ve talked to, this is the type of evidence that would be admissible in court – that was legally recorded.
We don’t know what the actual words on the tape are and what you can hear Trump saying, but the way it’s been described to us is that it is abundantly clear that it captures Trump’s knowledge that he:
- has classified information in his possession still, where it should not be, outside of the hands of federal government,
- and also is willfully keeping it, which is a really important element when you’re looking at a criminal case.
So that’s all very significant. Whether or not it’s declassified – his team spends a lot of time focusing on that, whether he had this ability to declassify – that’s actually not what the law is about.
Source: CNN
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