Following former President Donald Trump’s latest indictment, new claims have emerged about the nature of the classified documents he is charged with mishandling.
Trump, the current front-runner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary race, pleaded not guilty to the more than three dozen federal counts against him and sat down for an interview with Fox News Channel’s Bret Baier to discuss the matter in greater detail.
Specifically, he denied allegations that he took a classified document detailing sensitive military information involving Iran.
“There wasn’t a document,” he said. “I had lots of paper. I had copies of newspaper articles. I had copies of magazines. I had copies of everything.”
Baier pressed Trump on the indictment’s assertion that he was recorded telling people that he possessed “highly confidential” documents and acknowledged that he did not have the authority to declassify them.
The former president reiterated his earlier insistence that the boxes of documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida did not contain plans regarding a military operation in Iran.
“Bret, there was no document,” Trump said. “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.”
After denouncing the “very dishonest people” and “thugs” who provided testimony for the indictment, he took aim at some high-level officials who served in his own administration.
Trump said that he never received any classified information from Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a document from Milley,” he claimed. “Milley, frankly, was incompetent. The last one I’d want to attack with as my leader would be Milley.”
Wow. Trump tells Fox News' Bret Baier "I'm not great fan of Fox anymore." pic.twitter.com/KfAdTV4FyS
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) June 19, 2023
In the same interview, Baier brought up the fact that Trump has ridiculed several of the individuals he chose to serve in top administration positions and a number of his former allies have since turned on him.
Trump defended his choices, asserting: “I hired 10 to 1 that were fantastic. We had a great economy, we had phenomenal people in charge of the economy, we had phenomenal people in the military. I’m not a fan of Milley, I’m not a fan of certain television people.”
