West News Wire: Stephanie Grisham, a former press secretary for the White House, claimed on Saturday that she saw former President Trump display sensitive documents to visitors at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida.
Grisham, who led Trump’s communications team from July 2019 until April 2020, stated in an interview with MSNBC, “I observed him display documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room terrace. Therefore, he has never shown any respect for secret material.
Trump entered a not-guilty plea to 37 counts last month pertaining to his alleged handling of sensitive data improperly and his attempts to prevent the federal agency from reclaiming them.
A portion of a video from a meeting in July 2021 at the former president’s Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club was included in the federal indictment against him. During that conversation, Trump seemed to display a secret Pentagon document that he had brought from the White House.
Since the recording was recovered and made public by CNN last week, Trump has argued that the audio does not support his claims that he was in fact in possession of the secret document mentioned in it.
In an interview with Semafor and ABC News, Trump said, “I would say it was bravado; if you want to know the truth, it was bravado.” “I was speaking, simply talking about the papers I was holding up, although I didn’t have any documents. I didn’t have any documents.”
On the recording, the former president can be heard discussing the “highly confidential” and “secret information” with an author and book publisher working on a memoir of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
Trump also acknowledges in the recording that he could have declassified the materials when he was president but no longer could, undercutting his previous arguments that he had declassified the documents that remained in his possession after leaving the White House.
