Special Counsel Jack Smith has begun producing evidence for Donald Trump‘s lawyers in the federal case against the former President — and one revelation catching people by surprise is the mention of audio recordings of the former president. Recordings, in the plural.
The first production of evidence includes the following revelatory description:
“Interviews of Defendant Trump conducted by non-government entities, which were recorded with his consent and obtained by the Special Counsel’s Office during the investigation of this case, including the July 21, 2021 recorded interview Defendant Trump provided to a publisher and writer quoted in part in the Indictment;”
The existence of multiple recordings of Trump interviews is notable because early speculation about the case referenced a single audio tape allegedly in Smith’s possession that detailed Trump’s knowledge of the status of certain documents while he discussed them in his post-presidency.
According to the indictment, Trump is heard to say on tape that he could no longer declassify the document(s) at issue because he was no longer President.
The recent production of evidence to the Trump legal team — and the mention of more than one recording — has sparked feverish speculation. Tapes, after all, have laid low a President before (Nixon) and, as evidence goes, recordings are far sexier and more potentially damaging than almost any document.
But former U.S. Attorney Renato Mariotti believes the newly revealed recordings might not merit the excitable descriptions being used by some media outlets — Mediaite, for instance, calls the existence of the aforementioned audio tape an “explosive piece of evidence” in the “bombshell criminal case.”
Mariotti believes the newly revealed interviews in Smith evidence production could already be in the public domain — indeed, they might be TV interviews Trump conducted in the mainstream media.
Mariotti reveals that when his office worked on the corruption case of convicted former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, part of the evidence it sent to Blagojevich’s lawyers included the Governor’s own TV interviews.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the recordings of Trump produced as evidence by Jack Smith include Trump’s TV interviews.
— Renato Mariotti (@renato_mariotti) June 22, 2023
My former office sent Rod Blagojevich his own interviews in discovery during his prosecution. He complained about it during a late-night talk show interview. https://t.co/4SbOGw4V8E
Congressman Eric Swalwell‘s take on Trump’s most recent interview with Bret Baier at Fox News would seem to reinforce the idea that Trump may well have produced some of the evidence against him in his own public admissions.
Swalwell commented, after viewing one segment of the interview, that “Trump just confessed to Fox News that he stole and shared classified materials.”
Well that’s that. Trump just confessed to Fox News that he stole and shared classified materials. https://t.co/W35ZgpT0V9
— Rep. Eric Swalwell (@RepSwalwell) June 19, 2023
