On Thursday night, Jim Trusty, a lawyer representing Trump, told CNN that the charges “break out from an Espionage Act charge,” which he dismissed as “ludicrous.” (Trusty and another attorney, John Rowley, said in a statement Friday to Vanity Fair that they will no longer be representing Trump, who posted on Truth Social that he’ll be “represented by Todd Blanche, Esq., and a firm to be named later.”) “This was done by the military and given to me.” Look, look at this,” Trump says at one point in the transcript. The sound of papers being shuffled can be heard on the recording, sources told CNN, and Trump seems to be showing documents to the people in the room as he discusses “confidential” military information he retained involving Iran.

“As president, I could have declassified,” he says in the recording, per CNN. Speaking during a meeting at his Bedminster club in 2021, Trump repeatedly refers to a “secret” Pentagon document, which he directly says he did not declassify. “You can declassify just by saying it’s declassified.”īut a transcript of an audio recording obtained by CNN, and revealed the morning after Trump became the first former president to be indicted on federal charges, appears to undermine that defense. He has also held more short question-and-answer sessions and conducted more interviews in his first year and a half in office than Obama and Bush, according to a study from Martha Joynt Kumar, an emeritus political science professor at Towson University (via CNBC).The central tenet of Donald Trump’s claim to innocence in the classified documents probe has been his insistence that he had declassified the materials in question, perhaps simply “by thinking about it.” “There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it,” Trump told Sean Hannity last year, not long after federal agents executed a search of his Mar-a-Lago home. and that's going to take the place of a press briefing when you can talk to the president of the United States.Īs CNBC described, Trump does frequently directly address the public and the press via Twitter. But I always think if you can hear directly from the president and the press has a chance to ask the president of the United States questions directly, that's infinitely better than talking to me. As Sanders described on Fox News (via The Hill): Look, we talk to the press in a number of different ways. Sanders asserted that the administration prefers to prioritize Trump's direct interaction with the press over secretary-led briefings. Sanders reflected on why the Trump administration holds fewer briefings during an interview on Fox News Sunday in September 2018.

The outlet noted that Trump's administration has spent half as much time on on-the-record press briefings as Obama's administration when comparing the first 20 months of both presidents' terms. In addition to becoming less frequent, the Trump administration's briefings are also becoming shorter in length, Bloomberg reported in August 2018. However, the outlet indicated that, in 2018, the administration shifted to an average of about five briefings per month. In 2017, the Trump administration also hit an average of around ten briefings per month, the paper reported.

As the New York Times noted, during the majority of Obama's presidency, his administration held an average of at least ten press briefings per month. Prior to fall 2018, Sanders was taking the podium more frequently, the Washington Post reported, but seemingly still less often than her predecessors. In looking at how often White House press briefings happened under Obama and other previous administrations, it seems like Sanders' limited briefings may represent a break with tradition.Īs the New York Times reported, since last fall, Sanders has only been to the podium to deliver a formal press briefing once per month, starting in September. Given the length of time - 41 days - since Sanders last took the podium, you may be wondering if allowing so much time to pass in between briefings aligns with the practices of press secretaries past. 28, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders held her first press briefing of the year.

Trump press conference papers