Shortly after he left office, former President Donald Trump shared apparently classified information about US nuclear submarines with an Australian businessperson during an evening of conversation at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and residence in Florida, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The businessperson, Anthony Pratt, a billionaire member of Mar-a-Lago who runs one of the world’s largest cardboard companies, went on to share the sensitive details about the submarines with several others, the people said, potentially endangering the US nuclear fleet.
Federal prosecutors working for the special counsel, Jack Smith, learned about Mr Trump’s disclosures of the secrets to Mr Pratt, which were first revealed by ABC News, and interviewed him as part of their investigation into the former president’s handling of classified documents, the people said.
According to another person familiar with the matter, Mr Pratt is now among more than 80 people whom prosecutors have identified as possible witnesses who could testify against Mr Trump at the classified documents trial, which is scheduled to start in May in US District Court in Fort Pierce, Florida.
Mr Pratt’s name does not appear in the indictment accusing Mr Trump of illegally holding on to nearly three dozen classified documents after he left office and then conspiring with two of his aides at Mar-a-Lago to obstruct the government’s attempts to get them back.
But the account that Mr Trump discussed some of the country’s most sensitive nuclear secrets with him in a cavalier fashion could help prosecutors establish that the former president had a long habit of recklessly handling classified information.
And the existence of the testimony about the conversation underscores how much additional information the special prosecutor’s office may have amassed out of the public’s view.
During his talk with Mr Pratt, Mr Trump revealed at least two pieces of critical information about the US submarines’ tactical capacities, according to the people familiar with the matter. Those included how many nuclear warheads the vessels carried and how close they could get to their Russian counterparts without being detected.
It does not appear that Mr Trump showed Mr Pratt any of the classified documents that he had been keeping at Mar-a-Lago. In August last year, the FBI carried out a court-approved search warrant at the property and hauled away more than 100 documents containing national security secrets, including some that bore the country’s most sensitive classification markings.
Mr Trump had earlier returned hundreds of other documents he had taken with him from the White House, some in response to a subpoena.
A spokesperson for Mr Trump did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Mr Smith declined to comment. Representatives for Mr Pratt did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Even though Mr Pratt has been interviewed by prosecutors, the people familiar with the matter said, it remained unclear whether Mr Trump was merely blustering or exaggerating in his conversation with him.
Joe Hockey, a former Australian ambassador to United States, sought to play down Mr Trump’s disclosures to Mr Pratt in a phone interview Thursday.
“If that’s all that was discussed, we already know all that,” Mr Hockey said. “We have had Australians serving with Americans on US submarines for years, and we share the same technology and the same weapons as the US Navy.”
Still, it is not the first time Mr Trump has been known to share classified information verbally. During an Oval Office meeting in 2017 shortly after he fired FBI director James Comey, Mr Trump revealed sensitive classified intelligence to two Russian officials, according to people briefed on the matter.
Well into his presidency, he also posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, a classified photo of an Iranian launch site.
The indictment in the documents case also accused Mr Trump of showing a classified battle plan to attack Iran to a group of visitors to his club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Prosecutors claim that a recording of the meeting with the visitors depicts Trump as describing the document he brandished as “secret”.
Mr Trump has not had access to more updated US intelligence since leaving the presidency; president Joe Biden cut off the briefings that former presidents traditionally get when Mr Trump left office in the wake of Mr Trump’s efforts to overturn the election and the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob on January 6th, 2021.
“I just think that there is no need for him to have the intelligence briefings,” Mr Biden said at the time.
“What value is giving him an intelligence briefing?” he said. “What impact does he have at all, other than the fact he might slip and say something?”
Mr Trump’s interactions with Pratt appear to fit a pattern of collapsing the presidency and its secrets into his private interests.
Mr Pratt cultivated a relationship with Trump once he became president. He joined Mar-a-Lago in 2017, then was invited to a state dinner and had Trump join him at one of his company’s plants in Ohio.
– This article originally appeared in The New York Times.