Ross: Why Trump stole the documents, and then bragged about it

We now have the audio recording of Trump admitting he had classified documents he shouldn’t have had. You can even hear the sound of him waving the papers to the people in the room.

But what’s more important to me is what’s in those documents – which, based on what we hear Trump saying, was a plan to attack Iran drawn up by the US military.

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Here’s the excerpt from the recording made in July of 2021 at Trump’s Bedminster resort in New Jersey. He was talking to a group of people working on a book about his administration.

“Well, with [Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark] Milly, well, let me see that, I need to show you an example. He said I wanted to attack Iran. Isn’t it amazing I have a big pile of papers?” Trump said. “This was him; they presented me with this; this is off the record; they presented me this. by the way, this was him, this was the defense department and him. This wasn’t done by me. This was him. Pages long. Isn’t that amazing? Just totally wins my case. You know?”

So he’s talking about documents that lay out a plan to attack Iran, and he says this was all conjured up by the military, not by him.

So why is this significant?

Because in November 2020, the New York Times reported that “Trump asked senior advisers in an Oval Office meeting … whether he had options to take action against Iran’s main nuclear site” before he left office.

He was considering an attack of some kind.

At the time, Iran was in the process of increasing its stockpile of nuclear material after Trump blew off Obama’s nuclear deal, and Trump was apparently trying to figure out what to do.

His generals and his advisers tried to tell him that an attack would be crazy, but they evidently gave him the options.

And this was all written up in the classified documents which Trump stole. And so here he is, holding court at Bedminster a year ago, telling the people writing the history of his administration that he never considered attacking Iran, and the Generals wrote up those documents to make him look bad.

To me, that explains why he stole the papers. He wanted to know what the “Deep State” was saying about him – and once he found out, he proudly produced the documents so he could spin the story for the history books.

But what’s lost in all this is that thanks largely to Trump, Iran now has enough material for a nuclear weapon. The only question is, will it actually choose to assemble one?

Listen to Seattle’s Morning News with Dave Ross and Colleen O’Brien weekday mornings from 5 – 9 a.m. on KIRO Newsradio, 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.

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