[caption id="attachment_6705" align="alignnone" width="1592"] Former president Donald Trump speaks at the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women Lilac Luncheon in Concord, N.H., June 27, 2023. (Reba Saldanha/Reuters)[/caption]

By Ari Blaff. Media: National Review.

Donald Trump dismissed allegations that he revealed “highly confidential” information after CNN published an audio clip on Tuesday appearing to show him boasting of possessing top-secret “papers” from the Pentagon. “I would say it was bravado, if you want to know the truth, it was bravado,” the former president told Semafor. “I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.” “I just held up a whole pile of — my desk is loaded up with papers. I have papers from 25 different things,” Trump told the outlets, downplaying accusations that he possessed and carelessly showed “secret information” to an aide as well as people working on a biography of Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff. On Tuesday, Anderson Cooper, a CNN news anchor, released an audio recording capturing the former president speaking about General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his plans to attack Iran. “Isn’t it amazing? I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up,” he said during the 2021 meeting in Bedminster, N.J. “They presented me this – this is off the record – but they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him,” Trump continued, apparently referencing a plan related to an attack on Iran that was drafted by Milley. “It is like highly confidential, secret. This is secret information. Look, look at this,” Trump said. “See, as president I could have declassified, but now I can’t, you know…Isn’t that interesting? It’s so cool.” The document Trump was referring to in the leaked audio is not connected to the 31-count indictment Trump is facing for retaining classified records, CBS reported. Last week, Fox News aired a two-part interview between Trump and news anchor Bret Baier in which the host pressed the former president about his possession of classified material and received a similar answer. “There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” Trump said during the conversation. “And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.” Trump has stuck to his guns since the CNN audio clip was released. “No, I have no regrets,” Trump told the outlets near the end of their discussion. “I didn’t have a classified document. There was no classified document on my desk.” Asked whether he thought the audio recordings would impact his considerations for a plea deal, the former president pulled the plug on the interview. “Frankly, that you even ask a question like that’s a disgrace,” Trump said. “So let’s end it.” In early June, Trump pled not guilty to 37 counts stemming from mishandling of classified documents at his Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach.