As a result of his indictment by special prosecutor Jack Smith last month, former president Donald Trump is now accused of mishandling numerous classified documents on hundreds of criminal counts.

Nonetheless, he took time out of his increasingly hectic campaign schedule to address one of these documents, which, after an audio recording of him discussing it with visitors was released to the media, thrust him into the center of a new and heated controversy.

Smith accused Trump of handling top-secret information 37 times. Donald Trump, the primary opponent of President Joe Biden in the 2016 presidential election, could spend years in prison if he is proven guilty of all charges.

According to the indictment, Trump is accused of exchanging classified information twice with individuals who lacked the necessary security clearances. According to the Department of Justice, both incidents purportedly occurred at Trump’s Bedminster, New Jersey golf club.

CNN received information regarding one of the incidents reported.

The network reported on June 2 that federal prosecutors had “obtained an audio recording of a summer 2021 meeting in which former President Donald Trump acknowledges he held onto a classified Pentagon document about a potential attack on Iran, multiple sources told CNN, undercutting his argument that he declassified everything.”

The charges “include willful retention of national defense information, conspiracy to obstruct justice, withholding a document or record, corruptly concealing a document or record, concealing a document in a federal investigation, a scheme to conceal, and false statements and representations,” ABC News reported.

Trump claimed in an extended interview with Bret Baier on Fox News on Monday that he never revealed the top-secret American military strategy referenced in the audio recording.

The Epoch Times reports:

Trump insisted that he never showed any classified military plan to attack Iran prepared by General Mark Milley, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Trump says he never ordered the plan.

The meeting occurred on July 21, 2021, approximately six months after Trump’s presidency ended, at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. The meeting involved a writer, publisher, and two aides of the former president, and centered around a forthcoming book authored by Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff.

“There was no document,” Trump told Baier.

“That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things,” he continued. “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,” he explained.

During the meeting, the 45th president announced that he had detected the army general’s “plan of attack.” However, he denied providing Milley such orders and asserted that the allegation was false.

“I never ordered that to happen, no,” Trump told the Fox News anchor.

During the conversation, Baier expressed distress over Trump’s classification of a document as “secret,” which appeared to contradict his earlier claims that all relevant documents had been declassified. Trump emphasized that his remark referred to his limited ability to declassify records after leaving office. He went on to explain that the sources he had were confidential and therefore covert, which was why he had them.

“What I said, that I couldn’t declassify now, that’s because I wasn’t president,” Trump said. “I’d never made any bones about that. When I’m not president, I can’t declassify.”

Last week, Trump’s attorney Christina Bobb asserted to Newsmax that the Presidential Records Act allowed Trump to declassify documents whenever he wished while in office.

“Donald Trump was 100% authorized to keep everything he kept. And it was actually the Department of Justice that actually had to return materials because they took things they were not allowed to possess and had to return them,” she said.