Former President Donald Trump was apparently aware in 2019 that materials retrieved from his Mar-a-Lago estate earlier this year were highly classified, according to recorded conversations between him and veteran journalist Bob Woodward.
Earlier this week, excerpts were released from “The Trump Tapes,” an audiobook by Woodward that will be published later this month. In them, Trump tells Woodward about correspondences he received from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, which he has previously referred to as “love letters.”
“Don’t say I gave them to you, okay?” Trump tells Woodward in an excerpt from their conversation in December 2019.
In an excerpt of a conversation that took place in January 2020, Woodward asks Trump if he can see letters he wrote to Kim. “Oh, those are top secret,” Trump tells Woodward, although the journalist was eventually allowed to read the letters and record their contents on his tape recorder.
In commentary for the audiobook, Woodward reports being troubled by Trump’s cavalier attitude regarding the documents, saying that Trump responded to questions about North Korea’s nuclear program in a “casual, dangerous way.” It’s also likely that the former president revealed too much when bragging about the U.S.’s nuclear program, the journalist says.
“I have built a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about,” Trump tells him in the tapes.
The revelations from the Woodward audiobook could hurt Trump’s legal arguments in the case regarding his improper removal of thousands of government documents from the White House upon his exit from office, including at least 300 marked as classified.
Trump’s comments showcase that he knew almost three years ago that the letters between him and Kim were deemed classified. Since documents were retrieved from Mar-a-Lago in August, however, Trump has baselessly claimed that he had declassified those and other documents obtained by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) as president. Trump has even suggested that, as president, he had the ability to declassify documents merely through his thoughts.
If classified government documents had been declassified by the president, there would be a record of such an action, security experts have said. But there is no record of declassification for the Kim letters — and although the other documents retrieved from Mar-a-Lago have not yet been made public, there’s no indication they were declassified, either.
The Presidential Records Act requires all documents handled by or originating from the president to be handed over to NARA upon their departure from the White House, whether or not those documents are classified. This includes mementos like letters from foreign dignitaries.
It’s possible that Trump is still holding onto additional government documents, either at Mar-a-Lago or elsewhere. According to NARA, the agency has not yet recovered all of the documents it knows went missing when Trump became a private citizen.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
Over 80 percent of Truthout‘s funding comes from small individual donations from our community of readers, and the remaining 20 percent comes from a handful of social justice-oriented foundations. Over a third of our total budget is supported by recurring monthly donors, many of whom give because they want to help us keep Truthout barrier-free for everyone.
You can help by giving today. Whether you can make a small monthly donation or a larger gift, Truthout only works with your support.