Former President Donald Trump was reportedly hit with a subpoena for a classified document said to describe a potential U.S. plan to attack Iran — with his lawyers telling the feds they couldn’t find any such document.
The previously unknown subpoena was served in recent months, CNN reported Friday, as special counsel Jack Smith probes an audiotape of Trump telling a meeting at his New Jersey golf resort that he regretted not declassifying the Iran document so he could show it to the group.
Trump’s legal team reported to the feds that Trump has no document matching that description in his possession, The New York Times said.
The new revelations raise more questions than answers about the damning tape of Trump discussing the document at his Bedminster, New Jersey, resort in the summer of 2021, before the documents scandal erupted in earnest.
It’s possible that Trump was describing one of the documents that he later returned to the government or that FBI agents seized in a court-approved search of his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last August. Or he could still have the document in question but is refusing to hand it back to the feds.
Also possible: Trump might have been lying to associates about the existence of the document or its contents at the Bedminster meeting, which was intended as an interview for an unrelated memoir of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.
The new documents scandal surfaced this week when reports revealed that Smith’s prosecutors possessed the tape capturing Trump discussing the document and claiming it was classified at that time.
The admission would give powerful ammunition to prosecutors that Trump did not actually declassify the documents he took from the White House — and that he knew it.
Trump allegedly waved what he said was a top-secret classified document in front of a group of researchers for Meadows’ book, none of whom had needed security clearances.
The former president pointed to the document as evidence backing him in an unrelated feud with Gen. Mark Milley.
If the account of the audiotape and the classified document proves correct, it could amount to some of the strongest evidence yet against Trump in the classified documents case.
Smith is reportedly all but done presenting evidence to the grand jury, which has not met in three weeks. Reports say he could decide to seek indictments of Trump and perhaps others in the coming days or weeks.
Trump calls the new revelations part of the same liberal “witch hunt” he has battled since he launched his presidential ambitions in 2015.
———