The problem may end up being more political than legal.
It was mid- to late July 2021 and former president Donald Trump had decamped from his newly adopted Mar-a-Lago home for his summertime residence at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. He’d been out of office for about half a year and was playing host to researchers working on the “autobiography” of his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows. Trump’s aide Margo Martin was there, recording the conversation as she typically did, just in case Trump wanted to challenge something his interviewers claimed.
That, by itself, is telling. Trump has the habit of preserving documentary evidence just in case he needed to use it for leverage. And, in the conversation with the Meadows team, he reportedly demonstrated how that worked.
At some point before the discussion, the New Yorker had run a story examining how Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had sought to ensure Trump wouldn’t launch a war during his contentious last days in office. Trump, incensed, reportedly suggested to the researchers that he had a document that undercut the Milley narrative.
“Trump [brought] up the document, which he says came from Milley,” CNN’s Katelyn Polantz, Paula Reid and Kaitlan Collins reported Wednesday. “Trump told those in the room that if he could show it to people, it would undermine what Milley was saying, the sources said. One source says Trump refers to the document as if it is in front of him.”
This conversation was reportedly captured in the recording made by Martin, now in the hands of special counsel Jack Smith who is investigating various matters involving Trump.
“Several sources say the recording captures the sound of paper rustling, as if Trump was waving the document around,” CNN’s report continues, “though is not clear if it was the actual Iran document.”
A central aspect of the recording is contained in that “if he could show it,” explained more directly by the Guardian’s Hugo Lowell.
“Trump talks about how he cannot discuss the document because he no longer possesses the sweeping presidential power to declassify now out of office,” Lowell reports, “but suggests that he should have done so when he was still in the White House.”
Such a recording may be legally inculpatory, certainly.
