Ex-Trump officials question existence of Iran attack plan in leaked audio

WASHINGTON – Veterans of former President Donald Trump’s administration have suggested that a secret plan of attack against Iran that he allegedly showed off in the summer of 2021 never actually existed.

As part of the 44-page indictment unsealed June 9 against the 77-year-old Trump and his valet Walt Nauta, prosecutors led by special counsel Jack Smith recounted a conversation the 45th president had with a writer, a publisher and two members of his staff, during which Trump discussed a strategy to attack Iran he said was authored by Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Look what I found, this was [Milley’s] plan of attack, read it and just show … it’s interesting,” Trump allegedly said, later adding: “See as president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

Last week, CNN aired a two-minute audio clip from the July 21, 2021, discussion in which Trump is heard shuffling through papers as he talks about the purported plan.

But Ric Grenell, who served as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence in early 2020, and Kash Patel, former chief of staff to Trump’s last acting secretary of defense, told The Post they found it suspicious that the document was not listed among the 31 sensitive papers Trump was actually charged with retaining.

The two were called to testify before the grand jury that indicted Trump on a total of 37 counts, including conspiracy to obstruct justice, corrupt concealment, and making false statements to investigators. The former president has pleaded not guilty to all charges.

“Without getting into grand jury details, basically, I was like, ‘OK, show me the document you guys are referring to,’” Patel told The Post. “And they were like, ‘No, you should know which document.’ I’m like, ‘No, you’re the government, you show me.’ [Then prosecutors said,] ‘Oh, we don’t have it.’”

“I’ve been through that game with these guys before. And it doesn’t surprise me that they don’t have it,” he added.

All a joke?

In the audio, Trump references unspecified papers he claimed “totally wins my case” in discrediting a bombshell New Yorker article published days earlier. That piece asserted that Milley feared the 45th president would strike Iran during his final days in the White House in an attempt to remain in power despite losing the November 2020 presidential election.

“He said that I wanted to attack Iran, Isn’t it amazing?” Trump says. “I have a big pile of papers, this thing just came up. Look. This was [Milley.] They presented me this – this is off the record but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him.”

“All sorts of stuff, pages long. Isn’t that amazing? Totally wins my case – except it is like, highly confidential, secret. It is a secretive plan,” he added.

While legal experts jumped to call the audio “damning” proof of the strength of Smith’s case, Trump on Tuesday denied the papers he was heard handling were classified documents, claiming his words were merely “bravado.”

“I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents,” he told Semafor and ABC News reporters. “I didn’t have any documents.”

To Trump’s point, Patel said the laughter in the audio suggests he was joking about having an Iran attack plan at all.

“If you listen to Trump and have been in any meetings with him, which I’ve been in probably 100, he constantly jokes and brings levity even to the more serious situations to deliver his point and put people at ease,” he said. “And in the audio, he’s literally laughing and like ruffling papers.”

‘Neocon craziness’

So if Trump’s claim is true, then what exactly were the papers he was blustering about? The former president did not say.

Grenell, who admitted he “wasn’t in the room” and doesn’t know what other papers Trump had, suggested that the former president was actually rifling through printed pages from the New Yorker report.

“The fact that in the indictment there’s no talk of this document to me proves that the president in the audio recording is clearly talking about the New Yorker story, because the New Yorker story came out right before they did this interview,” he said. “And the New Yorker story was a fire in the hole for the credibility of the Trump administration’s claim that we were not starting new wars.”

“This is just my speculation from knowing the president and knowing the process,” he added.

Grenell, a former US ambassador to Germany, said Trump can get “emotional” about news stories – and added that the New Yorker article upset many former staffers who had worked to secure the former president’s promise of ending wars, not starting them.

“[Milley] was blunted in his preparations for war by the very real diplomats of the State Department who said, ‘No, we’re doing diplomacy,’” he said. “… President Trump never ever wanted war, so when the New Yorker piece – which I find to be complete bull—t – comes forward with, ‘Milley has a whole plan that Trump was briefed on to go to war with Iran,’ that is neocon craziness that did not exist in the Trump administration.

“So the New Yorker piece was something that so many of us that believe in America First policy and avoiding wars and having tough diplomats, we took as an assault on our very success,” Grenell added.

Patel, who was in the room for many of Trump’s meetings with defense officials in the final two months of his administration, agreed, calling it “beyond credulous” that the 45th president would have tasked the military to draw up an attack plan on Tehran.

“If you’re planning to attack somewhere, there is a mountain of movement that is required to get that to go. So where is that stuff?” he said. “Where are the prepared troop movements? Where were the logistical nodes? It just doesn’t happen overnight.

“If the [witnesses in the audio] saw that document, they would have said something by now, because that is a very unique document to have, if it ever existed,” Patel added. “And the fact that Trump was waving around stacks of papers and laughing, from the outside looking in, tells me he doesn’t have it.

“But from the inside looking out, I know he doesn’t have it because we never gave him [a plan].”

Federal prosecutors have asked for Trump’s trial to be delayed until Dec. 11 from a tentative Aug. 14 start date set by US District Judge Aileen Cannon. A status conference is due to take place July 14, with Nauta’s arraignment set for July 6.