Washington, D.C.—Former president Donald Trump shared classified information about US nuclear submarines with an Australian businessman shortly after he left office, in a meeting at his Florida private members club Mar-a-Lago, US media said Thursday (Friday in Manila).
The New York Times, citing unnamed sources, identified the businessman as billionaire Anthony Pratt, who heads one of the world’s largest packaging companies.
ABC News, which first revealed the story, said Pratt later shared sensitive details about the US submarines with “scores of others, including more than a dozen foreign officials, several of his own employees, and a handful of journalists.”
Sources told the Times that Trump’s disclosures “potentially endangered the US nuclear fleet.”
Federal prosecutors already investigating Trump for holding classified material at Mar-a-Lago after he left office, interviewed Pratt twice about the incident, the reports said.
Pratt may now be called by prosecutors to testify against Trump in his classified documents trial, which is due to start next May in Florida.
Pratt met Trump at his Palm Beach club in April 2021, and told the ex-president he thought Australia should start buying its submarines from the US, ABC reported.
In response, Trump allegedly told the businessman the exact number of nuclear warheads US submarines routinely carry, and precisely how close they can get to Russian submarines without being detected, the news outlet said.
Meanwhile, Trump has offered to temporarily take up the role of speaker of the House of Representatives, US media reported.
Republican Kevin McCarthy was axed this week as speaker in a brutal, historic rebellion by far-right members of his own party who accused him of a string of broken promises and were furious at his cooperation with Democrats.
“I have been asked to speak as a unifier because I have so many friends in Congress,” Trump told Fox News. “If they don’t get the vote, they have asked me if I would consider taking the speakership until they get somebody longer-term, because I am running for president.”
But former Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock told CNN that Trump would not be eligible for the role because he has been charged with criminal offenses.
“Unfortunately he doesn’t know the House rules, which say if you’re indicted you cannot be in House leadership,” Comstock said.
Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, is slated to go on trial in Washington next March for allegedly conspiring to subvert the results of the November 2020 election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
Aside from the classified documents case, Trump faces three other indictments: one federal and one in Georgia over his efforts to overturn his election loss and stay in power, and one in New York stemming from election-eve hush money payments in 2016 to a porn star.
Trump is currently on trial in New York on charges of wildly and fraudulently inflating the value of his assets so as to get better terms from banks and insurance companies. AFP