"Highly Confidential" -Trump

 

“…CNN published the audiotape of former president Trump talking in July 2021 about a classified document concerning Iran with a writer and others working on a biography of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows who did not have security clearances.

“In it, Trump says he cannot declassify the document since he is no longer president– undercutting his argument that he could declassify anything he wished at any time— and made it clear he knew he should not be showing the document to the people in the room, telling them it was ‘off the record’ and ‘highly confidential.’

“Journalist Garrett Graff, who wrote a history of President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, the one that led Nixon to resign under threat of impeachment and conviction, listened to the tape and tweeted: ‘Speaking as a Watergate historian, there’s nowhere on thousands of hours of Nixon tapes where Nixon makes any comment as clear, as clearly illegal, and as clearly self-aware as this Trump tape.’” 

-Heather Cox Richardson