On July 15, 2021, Susan Glasser of the New Yorker published a piece headlined “You’re Gonna Have a Fucking War”: Mark Milley’s Fight to Stop Trump from Striking Iran. Mark Milley was, and still is, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the nation’s highest-ranking military officer. Here is how the article began:

The last time that General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, spoke with President Donald Trump was on January 3, 2021. The subject of the Sunday-afternoon meeting, at the White House, was Iran’s nuclear program. For the past several months, Milley had been engaged in an alarmed effort to insure that Trump did not embark on a military conflict with Iran as part of his quixotic campaign to overturn the results of the 2020 election and remain in power. The chairman secretly feared that Trump would insist on launching a strike on Iranian interests that could set off a full-blown war.

They key fact here is that, rightly or wrongly, our nation’s highest-ranking military officer was very concerned that Trump would attack Iran as part of a plan to remain in power despite having lost the 2020 presidential election. Now, it’s quite possible that Milley was being paranoid and that Trump never considered carrying out that kind of desperate plan, but we know he did attempt a coup by other means. At least in that respect, Milley’s alarm was prescient.

When Trump read Glassner’s article, it irritated him greatly, and he was keen to punch back. And that sets the context for a meeting he had at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf resort later in July. In attendance were two people working on the memoir of Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows, as well as two Trump aides. None of them had security clearances to see classified information. Trump wanted to convey to these authors that Glasser had the story backwards. It wasn’t he that had been pushing to attack Iran but rather the Pentagon brass, including Milley, who had been pressuring him.

As proof of his claim, he brought out a document which he described as something “the Defense Department and [Milley]” had “presented” to him. He asked them repeatedly to look at it, and said it demonstrated that “[Milley] wanted to attack Iran” and “This totally wins my case.”

From the audio of the conversation, it’s clear that Trump wants these the writers to use the document to help him “win his case” against Milley’s allegations, but he recognizes that it’s problematic. He notes that the document is “highly confidential, secret. This is secret information” before admitting “as president I could have declassified it, but now I can’t.”

It’s not clear what Trump was showing them, but it was probably not proof that Milley wanted to attack Iran. The Pentagon naturally draws up contingency plans for every conceivable scenario, and it’s certain that they provided Trump with options for taking actions against Iran that ran the gamut from tougher sanctions to full blown invasion. The existence of these plans is not in any way advocacy for any particular course of action. What we know is that the information came from the Pentagon, was highly confidential and secret, and that it had to do with attacking Iran. It was not something that should have been in Trump’s possession, and it definitely was not something that he should have been showing to people who lacked security clearances.

It’s also something Trump has not turned over to the government. Either he still has it or he disposed of it, but his lawyers claim they can’t find it, and Trump claims it never existed.

Trump’s statements on the audio recording, saying “these are the papers” and referring to something he calls “highly confidential” and seems to be showing others in the room, could undercut the former president’s claims in an interview last week with Fox News’ Bret Baier that he did not have any documents with him.

“There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” Trump said on Fox. “And it may have been held up or may not, but that was not a document. I didn’t have a document, per se. There was nothing to declassify. These were newspaper stories, magazine stories and articles.”

One wonders why he bothers to tell such easily rebutted lies. They won’t help him in court. In fact, they’ll greatly hurt his credibility with the jurors. In this case, it’s really comprehensive in undercutting his defense. First, he admits that he’s in possession of material that remains classified and that he is powerless to declassify it. Second, the fact that document still hasn’t been returned demonstrates that he has not complied with a legally issued subpoena requiring him to turn it over. The fact that the document was in New Jersey rather than at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida raises questions about how honest he’s been about where he kept classified information. Third, his eagerness to share it with people not authorized to see it completely blows up any idea that his possession of classified information was harmless and comparable to other presidents (and vice-presidents) who improperly retained classified information. Fourth, his decision to go on television and lie about this episode will be admissible evidence, and since he’s highly unlikely to testify in his own defense it will go un-rebutted. Fifth, it shows his modus operandi. He wants to use classified information as a political weapon.

Amazingly, Trump is on the record talking about what wrong that is. In August 2018, when he revoked former Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan’s security clearance, he issued a statement that read in part, “Such access is particularly inappropriate when former officials have transitioned into highly partisan positions and seek to use real or perceived access to sensitive information to validate their political attacks.”

That is precisely what Trump was doing during this interview with Meadow’s biographers. He was using his access to classified information to validate a political attack on Milley.

Maybe Trump will get lucky and a Florida jury will deadlock causing a mistrial. But he’s so obviously guilty that it will hard for any juror to hold out and say that case is unproven.