Former press secretary says Trump showed classified documents to people on Mar-a-Lago dining patio

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said Saturday that she saw former President Trump show classified documents to people at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida.

“I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio,” Grisham, who served as Trump’s chief spokesperson from July 2019 to April 2020, said in an interview on MSNBC. “So, he has no respect for classified information, never did.” 

Trump pleaded not guilty last month to 37 counts related to his alleged mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to block the federal government from recovering them. 

The federal indictment against the former president featured a partial transcript of a recording of a July 2021 meeting at his Bedminster, N.J., golf club in which Trump appeared to show off a classified Pentagon document that he had taken with him from the White House.

Since the recording was obtained and aired by CNN last week, Trump has claimed that he was not actually holding the classified document referred to in the audio and suggested the recording exonerates him.

“I would say it was bravado; if you want to know the truth, it was bravado,” Trump said in an interview with Semafor and ABC News. “I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents. I didn’t have any documents.”

On the recording, the former president can be heard discussing the “highly confidential” and “secret information” with an author and book publisher working on a memoir of former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

Trump also acknowledges in the recording that he could have declassified the materials when he was president but no longer could, undercutting his previous arguments that he had declassified the documents that remained in his possession after leaving the White House.