So, based on that ^ contention, is it your claim that such a memo (as opposed to a newspaper or magazine article) did exist?
Have you seen it? What’s your source of information, punkin?
quotes: “I don’t do things wrong, I do things right. I’m a legitimate person.”
Less than a week later,
Trump was indicted and the
charging document was made public. In it, the recording is quoted at length. The details of the initial CNN report were largely confirmed.
...
Much of the response in the moment centered on the indictment itself, for understandable reasons. Trump and his allies portrayed the entire thing as baseless and political, which was to be expected.
During an interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier, Trump was asked to explain the incident. After a bit of back-and-forth in which Trump tried to claim he was only saying he no longer had the power to declassify documents, he offered a new defense.
“There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” Trump told Baier. “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.”
Then on Monday, CNN published the audio recording. The number of escape routes contracted dramatically.
Trump didn’t say he couldn’t declassify documents anymore; he said that he “could have declassified” the one at issue — indicating that it was still classified. The added information from the timing of the interactions, intonations and ambient sounds make very clear what was happening: Trump was showing something to the people with him, something he said was “secret information.”
“What did I say wrong with those recordings?” he said. “I didn’t even see the recording. All I know is I did nothing wrong. We had a lot of papers, a lot of papers stacked up. In fact, you could hear the rustle of the paper, and nobody said I did anything wrong other than the fake news, which, of course, is Fox, too.”
You’ll notice the internal contradiction here: he didn’t “see” the recording but is aware of the audible paper-rustling.
“I don’t do things wrong,” he added. “I do things right. I’m a legitimate person.”
theconservativetreehouse.com
