Veteran journalist Bob Woodward slammed the letters Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un sent to one another – correspondences that Trump illegally held onto after his presidency – as “unsophisticated” and “careless,” describing them as “the fondnesses that teenagers might exchange.”
The “Trump Tapes” author appeared on “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” to prove that the former president knew the correspondences were “top secret” despite withholding them from the National Archives for more than a year.
In one of the tapes, Woodward recalls asking Trump to see the letters he had received from the North Korean dictator. “Nobody else has them … I haven’t [shared them] with anybody,” Trump says before handing them over to Woodward.
O’Donnell also rolled several clips of Trump discussing “the beautiful letters” through which he and Kim “fell in love” throughout his presidency. The absence of those 27 letters from the National Archives would later alert the government to the other documents Trump was illegally storing at Mar-a-Lago.
“There’s nothing substantive in them,” Woodward said of the letters. “… If you read through them, you kind of laugh because Kim [is] wooing Trump in a very unsophisticated way and says, ‘Well, if we meet again, it will be out of a fantasy film,’ which I guess is the way Kim thought of it, and maybe to a certain extent, Trump did.”
Woodward also spoke about the manner by which Trump would share classified documents during their conversations.
“He’s very careless. He doesn’t see a line between what he liked to dish out or show people and what he probably shouldn’t,” Woodward said. “I hate to kind of puncture this, but I want to be realistic about it because the theme in all of these interviews is how unrealistic Trump is.”
Woodward continued, “He does not understand the presidency, does not understand his obligations to people.”
He added that Trump’s reckless disregard for security “traumatized his national security team,” who thought, “He’s going to get us in a war, he’s going to do something that will set Kim Jong-un off.”
Watch the full segment above.
