In an audio recording shared by CNN on Monday, former President Donald Trump cracks jokes about Anthony Weiner after an aide quips that Hillary Clinton also allegedly mishandling classified information.
Several of the details have already been reported about the July 2021 conversation that led to Trump being indicted on 37 counts of violating the Espionage Act for, but the newly released two-minute recording shows Trump in a jovial mood as he talks with his aides.
After Trump mentions the papers are “highly confidential” and “secret information,” a female staffer jokes, “Hillary would print that out all the time, you know. Her private emails.”
“No, she’d send it to Anthony Weiner,” Trump joked, referring to the disgraced former Democratic congressman, who served nearly two years in federal prison after pleading guilty to one count of transferring obscene material to a minor.
“These are the papers,” Trump says in the recording, claiming that they prove that it was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley who wanted to attack Iran, and not him, as was claimed in a 2021 New Yorker article. “It totally proves my case. Except it is highly secretive,” Trump says.
This directly contradicts what he told Fox News’ Bret Baier last week. “There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. “And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”
TheWrap has reached out to Trump’s reps for comment.
