Donald Trump sat down for an interview Monday night with Fox News host Bret Baier, who pressed the former president on his classified files case, his stance on key foreign policy issues and the 2024 presidential race.
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The interview comes less than a week after Trump, who is running again for president, pleaded not guilty to 37 charges in the Department of Justice (DOJ) case into whether he improperly stored classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago residence after leaving office in January 2021. The issue of these legal woes dominated the first part of the sit-down, with Trump maintaining his innocence in the case.
Trump remains the frontrunner to win the Republican primary, as polls show him beating a number of high-profile challengers including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence. He touched on a number of the issues that have so far dominated the 2024 presidential race.
Here is a look at five key moments from Trump’s interview:
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Bret Baier Questions Trump on Why He Kept Classified Documents
Baier kicked off the interview with questions about Trump’s ongoing classified documents case. Specifically, he asked Trump why he did not return the documents to the government.
“Why not just hand them over then?” he asked.
Trump responded: “I wanted to go through the boxes and get all my personal things out of them. I don’t want to hand that over to [the National Archives and Records Administration] yet. And I was very busy, as you’ve sort of seen.”
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The former president said there were “many things” beyond classified documents including “golf shorts, clothing, pants, shoes.” When Baier asked if the boxes contained defense documents, Trump said, “Not that I know of.”
Throughout the interview, Trump maintained his assertion that the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago were declassified and that Justice Department conducted a politically-motivated search.
Baier Confronts Trump on Bedminster Tape
Baier also confronted Trump about one specific allegation made by the Department of Justice.
Federal prosecutors wrote in the indictment against the former president that he was allegedly recorded admitting to having a classified document about an attack plan on another country prepared by the U.S. military. Baier asked Trump about the audio tape, noting he was “quoted on the recording.”
“When I said that I couldn’t declassify it now, that’s because I wasn’t president,” Trump said. “There was no document. That was a massive amount of papers and everything else talking about Iran and other things. 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.”
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Trump Fact-Checked on the 2020 Election
Baier fact-checked Trump on the 2020 presidential election, which Trump has repeatedly claimed, without substantial evidence, was stolen from him by widespread voter fraud. He made a number of his fraud claims during the interview, including that people were “stuffing the ballot boxes” in response to a question about how he will win back independent, suburban women, a group that has shifted toward Democrats in recent election cycles.
“You lost the 2020 election,” Baier said, as Trump spoke over him insisting that he won the election. “There were recounts in all the swing states. There was not significant widespread fraud. There were investigations of widespread corruption. There was not a sense of that. There were lawsuits—more than 50 of them—by your lawyers, some in front of judges you appointed that came out with no evidence.”
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The exchange was particularly notable after Fox News in April settled a lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems, which accused the network of promoting unfounded claims that ballots cast through their voting machines were “flipped” from Trump to President Joe Biden while privately acknowledging those claims were untrue.
Trump Admits John Bolton Was ‘Pretty Good’
The former president also defended his hiring record while he was president when he was pressed about a number of former administration officials who have turned against him.
He said that when he named some of his appointments, such as former Attorney General William Barr, who has become sharply critical of Trump, he was only involved in politics “from the other side.” He pledged to appoint “strong people” in his administration if elected again.
But his remarks about former National Security Advisor John Bolton may have come as a surprise to many, as Bolton has also become a Trump critic. Earlier this month, Bolton took a jab at Trump by saying he had a “constant fixation” on trying to hold onto documents.
“Actually, Bolton was good because every time I negotiated people said ‘Oh, they’ve got this maniac here. He’s going to go to war with us,'” Trump said. “He was actually pretty good in a certain way.”
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Trump Reenacts Phone Call With Vladimir Putin
Trump discussed with Baier his foreign policy goals if elected president in 2024. He has been sharply critical of Biden’s stance on a number of global issues, accusing him of projecting a weaker image of the United States than under his administration. He has said that Russia would not have invaded Ukraine if he won reelection in 2020, though many experts have been skeptical of that claim.
He reenacted a phone call he once had with Russian President Vladimir Putin to drive home that point.
Trump said: “I talked to him. I said, ‘If you do it, there’s going to be hell to pay. It’s going to be a catastrophe. Don’t do it.’ He said, ‘No, no no. We won’t do that.’ I told him I was going to do something. He said ‘No, no no. You will not do that.’ I said ‘I will, Vladimir. I will do it. I’m going to do it.'”
He said Putin only believed him “10 percent,” but that “10 percent was all you needed” to prevent the invasion.
