Asked whether it's "plausible [Donald] Trump was showing classified documents to people in private meetings," former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham pulled no punches on what she witnessed while working for the Trump administration. "The short answer is yes," Grisham replied in a Saturday interview with MSNBC centering on the former president's indictment for allegedly holding onto classified information after he'd departed the Oval Office. "I watched him show documents to people at Mar-a-Lago on the dining room patio. So he has no respect for classified information. Never did."
Grisham's take came after MSNBC replayed a recording that's been circulating of Trump showing someone an apparent classified document from the Pentagon in July 2021 at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey—an incident that Trump has since said was just "bravado" on his part. "I was talking and just holding up papers and talking about them, but I had no documents," he recently told ABC News and Semafor, per the Hill. "I didn't have any documents."
But in an analysis for the Washington Post, Aaron Blake says the allegation tracks with Trump's history of being "cavalier with sensitive information," which Blake notes started almost as soon as he entered the White House in early 2017. Among the examples Blake offers: Trump using cellphones that lacked security while in office; his revelation in May 2017 of "highly classified information" to top Russian officials who were visiting him at the White House; and an August 2019 tweet where he showed a detailed aerial image of an Iranian launch pad, which aides had reportedly tried to talk him out of tweeting (read more on other incidents here).
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As for Trump's "bravado" claims, his former press chief shook her head at that on MSNBC. "I think this is like his seventh or eighth defense," noted Grisham, who says the possibility that he showed classified documents to people who hadn't been carefully vetted makes her "so angry." "This is just the newest." She also said it doesn't sync with what the audio relays. "That's not bravado. You can't tell me that he's holding up a newspaper while he's saying the military put this together for me." (More classified information stories.)
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