Washington
CNN
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Former President Donald Trump lied that he had handed over his correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un to the National Archives, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman Hall. CNN.
Trump also claimed in Haberman’s interview that he didn’t watch TV when the riots broke out at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, contradicting testimony from White House aides to House committees investigating the Jan. 6 riots .
Haberman’s book “The Confident Man” will be released on Tuesday. The book includes new details about Trump’s time in the White House, documenting how the former president’s rise in New York City politics and real estate in the 1970s and 1980s ultimately shaped his worldview and his presidency.
Haberman told The New York Times, which first reported the audio clip, that she “gleefully” asked Trump in a September 2021 interview if he had taken any memorabilia documents from the White House. Trump told Haberman, “There’s no urgency, no,” before unsoliciting Kim’s letter.
“I have great stuff, though, you know. Letters, letters from Kim Jong Un. I have a lot,” Trump said.
“Can you take those?” Haberman asked.
“No, I think there is…I think that’s in the archives, but mostly in the archives. But the letter from Kim Jong Un, we have incredible things. My letters with other leaders are unbelievable.”
CNN and other outlets have previously reported that Trump, in fact, kept Kim’s letters in tens of thousands of government documents he brought to his Mar-a-Lago resort after he left the White House. The letters were among the items in a box he turned over to the National Archives in January, which also included classified material that prompted the archives to refer the matter to the Justice Department.
In another audio clip of her interview with Trump, Haberman asked how Trump found the mob breaking into the Capitol. The former president claimed he didn’t watch TV.
Haberman asked Trump how he discovered the uprising.listen to his reply
“I heard about it later, actually in the later period. I was in a meeting. I was also with (then White House chief of staff) Mark Meadows and others. I didn’t watch TV. I didn’t Turn on the TV,” he said.
Trump continued: “I don’t usually turn on the TV. If there’s anything I’ll put it on. Then I turned it on and I saw what was going on.”
But in fact, Trump did see the chaos in the Capitol on television, one of the focuses of a Jan. 6 committee hearing earlier this year.
Haberman told The Times she believes Trump’s lies about what he did on January 6 represent two things: “His desire to construct an alternate reality and his response to any suggestion that he watches a lot of TV is particularly sensitive, and he thinks people will weaken his intelligence (even if he watches a lot of TV).”