Recordings made by journalist Bob Woodward of his interviews with Donald Trump appear to contradict Trump’s claims that none of the documents he took were classified.
An excerpt from a new audiobook revealed that President Donald Trump shared classified letters from Kim Jong Un, the North Korean leader, with journalist Bob Woodward and seemed to acknowledge that they were sensitive material that he should not be sharing.
“Don’t say I gave them to you,” Trump said in December 2019, according to a copy of Woodward’s audiobook obtained by CNN, adding that “nobody else” had the letters and imploring the journalist to “treat them with respect.”
The Washington Post reported that a month later, in January 2020, Woodward also asked to see letters that Trump had written to the North Korean leader. Trump replied, “Oh, those are so top secret.”
The original letters between Kim and Trump were among the voluminous number of presidential records that the National Archives tried to recover from Trump after he left office. Trump resisted returning the boxes of documents he had taken to his Florida estate, describing them to several advisers as “mine.”
The recordings appear to contradict Trump’s claims that none of the material he took with him from the White House was sensitive, or that the documents were personal records. Trump has also asserted that as president, he could have declassified any sensitive documents without a formal process “just by saying ‘it’s declassified’ — even by thinking about it.”
In September 2021, Trump appeared at first to indicate to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, in an interview during research for her book “Confidence Man,” that he had the letters from Kim, then backtracked and said they were with the archives. In reality, they were not returned to the government for four more months, when the archives retrieved 15 boxes of material that Trump was keeping at his private club and residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.
Questions about Trump’s handling of the thousands of pages of government material he took with him when he left the White House — including hundreds of classified files — are at the heart of a Justice Department investigation into whether Trump violated laws governing the handling of sensitive documents or engaged in obstruction as the government sought to recover them.
