Four Key Words On Trump Tape Missing From Indictment Argues Washington Post Columnist: ‘May Be Worse Than We Thought’
The Washington Post’s Philip Bump offered a kind of correction to Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Trump tape transcript, which features prominently in the 37-criminal-count indictment of the former president for mishandling classified documents.
In recent days the audio of the tape has leaked to the media, which has allowed observers and commentators like Bump to come to some of their own conclusions.
“On Wednesday morning, I was listening to the audio recording of Trump apparently discussing a classified document at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club in 2021. As I did so, I noticed that Trump said something particularly telling,” Bump wrote in his latest column titled, “The Trump classified-document audio may be worse than we thought,” adding:
Here’s how I transcribed the section, during which Trump appears to be trying to figure out if he can share the document with the writer to whom he’s speaking.
Trump: Declassify. See, as president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know. But this is classified.
Staffer: (laughing) Yeah, now we have a problem.
Trump: Isn’t that interesting?
Bump believes that Smith left out these key four words from Trump: “But this is classified.” He then quotes from the federal indictment’s version of the transcript to highlight the discrepancy:
TRUMP: See as president I could have declassified it.
STAFFER: Yeah. [Laughter]
TRUMP: Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.
STAFFER: Yeah. [Laughter] Now we have a problem.
Notably, when listening to the audio tape, the section of which Bump shared online, it does appear he is correct that Trump said “this is classified,” although there is a lot of other noise at that moment.
Bump goes on to explain why this is so important:
If Trump said “this is still a secret,” he has some wiggle room on denying that he was showing his audience a document that was legally protected under classification rules. If he said “this is classified,” that goes out the window. It’s Trump admitting that he had something that was classified in his hand, at that moment — and was showing it to people.
Bump concludes by noting, however, that the audio is indeed difficult to hear and different people “heard Trump as transcribed by prosecutors.”
