White House officials privately express concern about classified information taken to Mar-a-Lago

Anderson Cooper 360

CNN

News

3.7 • 3.8K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2022

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

White House officials are telling CNN they have “deep concern” about the documents found at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Some documents were found in a basement-level storage facility at Trump’s Florida home and officials worry the information they contain could put the sources and methods of the U.S. intelligence community at risk. Tom Blanton is the director at the National Security Archive at George Washington University. He joins AC360 to discuss how dangerous it was to have these documents in a storeroom without a padlock on it. Plus, with midterm elections around the corner, vulnerable Republicans are being told to not be distracted by the former President while on the campaign trail with one saying “I don’t say his name, ever.” CNN Senior Political Commentator David Axelrod tells Anderson Cooper whether he thinks that strategy will work for these candidates in November. To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Good evening and welcome to what might be called the perfect phone call stage of the
0:04.6	latest scandal involving the former president.
0:06.6	You recall the phone call was the phrase the former president used to describe the call
0:10.3	that got him impeached, the call in which he tried to strong arm the president of Ukraine
0:14.4	until helping him smear Joe Biden.
0:16.9	He called that a perfect phone call after his supporters and enablers had made a slew
0:20.4	of excuses about the call, none of which really held up, so the then president embraced the
0:25.4	call and said it was perfect.
0:28.0	What is where we've landed tonight, after two business weeks of unprecedented revelations
0:31.7	since the FBI agents executed a lawful search warrant at Marlongo and came away with
0:36.4	11 sets of documents the former president was not entitled to have, including four sets
0:41.3	of highly classified material.
0:43.2	The president's one-time attorney Rudy Giuliani has now made the perfect phone call excuse.
0:49.6	And now they want to make them responsible for having taken classified documents and
0:55.4	preserve them really if you look at the espionage act, it's not really about taking the documents,
1:02.4	it's about destroying them or hiding them or giving them to the enemy.
1:08.3	It's not about taking them and putting them in a place that's roughly as safe as they
1:14.1	were in in the first place.
1:16.2	Taking classified documents, some Mark Top Secret SCI for sensitive compartmental information
1:21.8	and keeping them in a basement of a Florida club that all mannered people frequent is
1:26.0	quote, roughly as safe, unquote, as keeping them the national archives or the Westway,
1:30.8	according to Rudy Giuliani, or in the case of some of the material, a special sensitive
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CNN, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of CNN and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.