LISTEN: Trump Implores Bob Woodward ‘Don’t Say I Gave Them to You’ After Sharing Kim Jong Un Letters
As Bob Woodward prepares to release his full trove of recorded conversations with Donald Trump, an audio clip has shown a moment in retrospect where the former president seemingly admits that the documents he wrongfully took to Mar-a-Lago dealt with “top secret” classified information.
The Trump Tapes is scheduled for release next week, and the audiobook contains more than eight hours of interviews Trump gave to Woodward while he was still president. In one interview dated back to December 2019, Trump showed Woodward the letters from Kim Jong-un that he frequently brags about receiving, and he seemed to acknowledge that he should not have been sharing them.
“Nobody else has them, but I want you to treat them with respect,” Trump said. Woodward replied that he understood, and Trump immediately followed up by telling him, “don’t say I gave them to you, okay?”
CNN obtained that exchange between Trump and Woodward, but the Washington Post expanded on that by flagging an interview a month later where Woodward asked the former president to let him see the letters he wrote to the North Korean tyrant.
“Oh, those are so top secret,” Trump responded.
The Trump-Kim letters have been a recurring news topic ever since the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago for the classified documents Trump was keeping at his Florida estate. The letters were among the documents that Trump refused to return to the National Archives despite multiple requests, and the Woodward exchanges seemingly show Trump contradicting his own claims that the documents he took were non-sensitive, that he declassified them on a whim, and that the documents were his personal records.
From the Post:
In hindsight, the comments by Trump show he was well aware that the 27 letters exchanged between himself and Kim were classified, despite his repeated claims that none of the documents he improperly took from the White House when leaving office, including the Kim letters, were in that category. The FBI and Justice Department this year executed a court-authorized search of Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago Club and residence — turning up 103 documents marked classified and roughly 11,000 not marked classified as part of an ongoing criminal probe into Trump’s handling of sensitive material.
Trump remains under investigation by the Justice Department for his handling of classified information.
Watch above via CNN.
