The Trump classified-document audio may be worse than we thought

In the spring of 2018, the internet was briefly gripped by a weird fever: Did you hear “Yanny” or “Laurel?”

This doesn’t make any sense in the abstract, admittedly. At issue was a short clip of a man speaking a name, a clip in which some people heard “Laurel” and other “Yanny.” The name that was heard depended on the quality of the audio and on the listener, providing lots of fodder for the internet’s favorite activity, arguing about nonsense.

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Now, though, we may have a much more important example of a similar phenomenon.

On Wednesday morning, I was listening to the audio recording of Trump apparently discussing a classified document at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club in 2021. As I did so, I noticed that Trump said something particularly telling.

Here’s how I transcribed the section, during which Trump appears to be trying to figure out if he can share the document with the writer to whom he’s speaking.

Trump: We could probably … right?

Staffer: I don’t know. We’ll have to see. Yeah. We’ll have to try to figure out a—

Trump: Declassify. See, as president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know. But this is classified.

Staffer: (laughing) Yeah, now we have a problem.

Trump: Isn’t that interesting?

The “but this is classified” does not comport with existing transcripts. I tweeted out what I heard, along with the audio snippet itself.

Was listening to the tape again for a story and realized that the part in red below — muffled by cross-talk — often isn’t included in transcripts. pic.twitter.com/rVa5aPYL08

— Philip Bump (@pbump) June 28, 2023

This conservation is also summarized in the federal indictment made public earlier this month. The government’s transcript, though, uses different language.

TRUMP: See as president I could have declassified it.

STAFFER: Yeah. [Laughter]

TRUMP: Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.

STAFFER: Yeah. [Laughter] Now we have a problem.

TRUMP: Isn’t that interesting?

This is an important distinction. If Trump said “this is still a secret,” he has some wiggle room on denying that he was showing his audience a document that was legally protected under classification rules. If he said “this is classified,” that goes out the window. It’s Trump admitting that he had something that was classified in his hand, at that moment — and was showing it to people.

Perhaps I misheard the audio; perhaps Trump was saying “Yanny.” Some of those who responded to my tweet in fact heard Trump as transcribed by prosecutors.

Or, perhaps, the recording is more damaging to Trump than it at first seemed.

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