There’s been a lot of books about the Trump presidency, and to that towering pile you can add an audiobook. Bob Woodward, one of the reporters who blew open the Watergate scandal, is releasing The Trump Tapes, which features eight hours of interviews he conducted with the former presidency from 2016 through this year. Excerpts have already been made available, and wouldn’t you know they reveal him just casually showing the legendary journalist some letters he would later take with him to Mar-a-Lago, despite admitting, on tape, that they’re highly classified.
Audio of Trump handing Woodward the Kim Jong Un letters:
Trump: Don’t say I gave them to you pic.twitter.com/uPwQJwAlZN— Acyn (@Acyn) October 18, 2022
In one exchange, from December of 2019, Trump can be heard handing letters written to him by North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, intimating that he shouldn’t be doing what he’s doing.
“Nobody else has them,” he brags. He then tells Woodward to “treat them with respect,” adding, “And don’t say I gave them to you, okay?”
A month later, Woodward asked Trump if he can see the letter he wrote to Kim, but Trump tells him, “Oh, those are so top secret.”
There are 27 letters between Trump and Kim, which were among those that he took with him to the resort in which he now lives. Since the FBI raided his home, leaving with boxes and boxes of documents, Trump has thrown one defense after another against the wall, including saying they weren’t sensitive. This is audio admission that he knew the opposite.
But then, maybe as the criminal investigation into his improper handling of government documents continues — ditto his many other worries — he can always go back to the claim that he could declassify them with his mind.
(Via The Washington Post)