Trump Acknowledges That Letters to North Korea’s Kim Jong Un Were ‘Top Secret’

“Don’t say I gave them to you,” Trump said in December 2019, according to a copy of Woodward’s audiobook obtained by CNN, adding that “nobody else” had the letters and imploring the journalist to “treat them with respect”.

The Washington Post reported that a month later, in January 2020, Woodward also asked to see letters that Trump had written to the North Korean leader. Trump replied, “Oh, those are so top secret,” The New York Times reported.

The original letters between Kim and Trump were among the voluminous number of presidential records that the National Archives tried to recover from Trump after he left office. He resisted returning the boxes of documents he took to his Florida estate, describing them to several advisers as “mine”.

The recordings appear to contradict Trump’s claims that none of the material he took with him from the White House was sensitive, or that the documents were personal records.

Trump has also asserted that as president, he could have declassified any sensitive documents without a formal process “just by saying ‘it’s declassified’ – even by thinking about it”.

In September 2021, Trump appeared at first to indicate to Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, in an interview during research for her book Confidence Man that he had the letters from Kim, then backtracked and said they were with the archives.

In reality, they were not returned to the government for four more months, when the archives retrieved 15 boxes of material that Trump was keeping at his private club and residence in Florida, Mar-a-Lago.

Questions about Trump’s handling of the thousands of pages of government material he took with him when he left the White House – including hundreds of classified files – are at the heart of a Justice Department investigation into whether Trump violated laws governing the handling of sensitive documents or engaged in obstruction as the government sought to recover them.

Trump has long been fixated on his personal relationship with Kim. While in office, he brandished letters from the dictator to reporters and other visitors to the White House.

The rapport that he claimed he had developed with Kim did little to significantly improve relations with the totalitarian regime, as Kim continued his policy of nuclear proliferation and aggressive displays of military power.

Trump also described in his interviews with Woodward how he would taunt the North Korean leader with a euphemistic warning about their respective nuclear arsenals.

“I said: ‘My button’s bigger than yours, and my button works. Yours doesn’t’,” he said. “You know, stuff like that.”