Former President Donald Trump may have self-incriminated himself so much in the classified documents investigation that it may be difficult for him to escape prosecution, according to one legal expert.
Attorney Jamie White, who worked with the sexual abuse victims of former Team USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, reacted to reports that special counsel Jack Smith’s team has obtained an audio recording of Trump admitting he retained classified material after he left the White House in January 2021, and that he no longer had the authority to declassify it.
Claims of the audio recording, first reported by CNN on Wednesday, casts doubt on Trump’s long argued defense that he had declassified all the documents, which were recovered by the FBI from his Mar-a-Lago resort last August, three months after the former president received a federal subpoena demanding all classified materials be handed over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
During a CNN town hall last month, Trump made the claim that all the classified documents “become automatically declassified” once they were taken from the White House. Last September, the former president told Fox News he had the power as president to declassify top secret documents just “by thinking about it.”
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White told Newsweek on Thursday that if reports about the audio tape are accurate, then the former president, who has already pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of falsifying business records as part of an historic legal case in New York, may face further legal issues.
“The revelation of this recording shows that the law is finally catching up to Donald Trump. At this point, Trump is like a hit-and-run driver who is being caught in a police dragnet,” White said. “In this recording of Trump reportedly discussing a classified document about Iran, if he says in that tape that he knows the document is classified and yet he still held onto it, that will go a long way to proving that Trump intended to violate the law when he refused to give documents back to the National Archives.”
White continued: “Proving criminal intent was always going to be a challenge in the documents case. But now, evidence is coming out that Trump has essentially convicted himself with his own words. The public has seen him do it over and over again, and now his lawyers will have to come up with some creative legal defenses if he ever gets charged over this.”
White also suggested that the “worst job in America right now” is being Trump’s attorneys because of the “self-inflicted legal wounds” that “no lawyer can patch up.”
“Just try making a convincing legal argument that Trump can declassify documents telepathically, just by thinking about it. It’s almost impossible to make that argument stick,” White said. “The best option Trump’s attorneys had would be some form of ignorance, arguing he didn’t fully understand how what he was doing was wrong. But this tape of Trump discussing the Iran document deals a huge blow to that defense.”
Newsweek has contacted Trump’s legal team via email for comment.
The alleged audio was recorded at Trump’s golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, in July 2021 during a meeting with people who were helping write the autobiography of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Trump is said to have been irate at media reports at the time that his Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Mark Milley had talked him down from attacking Iran in the final few days of his presidency.
Trump then discussed possessing a secret Pentagon paper, which he said would have disproved what the general was saying. The former president is alleged to have said he could not show the paper to those in the room as they did not have the necessary security clearance to view classified documents.
The audio was recorded by Trump aide Margo Martin, who regularly taped conversations the former president had with authors to ensure his comments were reported accurately. Martin’s laptop and other devices were imaged by prosecutors in January.
Trump further denied any wrongdoing in connection to the classified documents investigation on Thursday, telling Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he does not “know anything” about the apparent audio, but that “everything I did was right.”
Trump, who is running for president again in 2024 and is currently the favorite to clinch to the GOP nomination, also accused the classified documents investigation, which was launched by the Department of Justice (DOJ), of being politically motivated
“When you look at it, it’s a continuation of the greatest witch hunt of all time. It’s a hoax,” the former president said. “And it has to do more than anything else with trying to interfere with the election.”