RED HANDED

Trump Tape Was Turning Point for Skeptical Prosecutors in Docs Case: Report

The audio recording provided prosecutors with enough of a motive to pursue criminal charges, according to a new report.

Some officials in the FBI and Department of Justice were torn on whether to raid Mar-a-Lago as part of their investigation into Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents—but a bombshell audio recording in which Trump allegedly boasted of having “secret information” quashed much of that uncertainty, The Wall Street Journal reported. At first, prosecutors struggled to pinpoint a motive and could not prove rumors that Trump shared classified information with others, sources told the Journal. Even Trump’s alleged refusal to respond to a subpoena to hand over all classified material wasn’t quite enough. But when prosecutors got their hands on a tape of a meeting at Trump’s golf club in New Jersey, it reportedly pushed the case over the edge. In the tape, detailed in Trump’s eventual indictment, the ex-president allegedly brandished a classified Pentagon document and confessed he knew it hadn’t been declassified. Trump has insisted he didn’t know “anything about it” and that “everything I did was right.”