Recordings made by Bob Woodward of his interviews with Donald Trump appear to contradict Mr. Trump’s claims that none of the documents he took with him from the White House were classified.
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President Donald J. Trump and Kim Jong-un met in the border village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone in 2019.
WASHINGTON — An excerpt from a new audiobook revealed that President Donald J. Trump shared classified letters from Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, with the 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,” Mr. Trump said in December 2019, according to a copy of Mr. 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, Mr. Woodward also asked to see letters that Mr. Trump had written to the North Korean leader. Mr. Trump replied, “Oh, those are so top secret.”
The original letters between Mr. Kim and Mr. Trump were among the voluminous number of presidential records that the National Archives tried to recover from Mr. Trump after he left office. Mr. 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 Mr. 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. Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Kim, then backtracked and said they were with the archives. In reality, they were not returned to the government for another four months, when the archives retrieved 15 boxes of material that Mr. Trump was keeping at his private club and residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.
Questions about Mr. 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 Mr. Trump violated laws governing the handling of sensitive documents or engaged in obstruction as the government sought to recover them.
Mr. Trump has long been fixated on his personal relationship with Mr. Kim. While in office he brandished letters from the dictator to reporters and other visitors to the White House. The rapport that he claimed he had developed with Mr. Kim did little to significantly improve relations with the totalitarian regime, as Mr. Kim continued his policy of nuclear proliferation and aggressive displays of military power.
Mr. Trump also described in his interviews with Mr. Woodward how he would taunt the North Korean leader with a euphemistic warning about their respective nuclear arsenals.
“I said: ‘My button’s bigger than yours, and my button works. Yours doesn’t,’” he said. “You know, stuff like that.”
Source: nytimes.com
