Donald Trump on Wednesday described vivid details from a video he said he had watched earlier in the day of Iranian officials unloading cash from an airplane. The money was part of a payment, announced earlier this year, from the U.S. to Iran to settle a decades-old dispute over an incomplete weapons sale.
“I’ll never forget the scene this morning,” Trump told the crowd in Daytona Beach, Florida, of what he said he had watched. “Iran ― I don’t think you’ve heard this anywhere but here ― Iran provided all of that footage, the tape, of taking that money off that airplane.
“Over there, where that plane landed, top secret, they don’t have a lot of paparazzi, you know,” Trump said. “The paparazzi doesn’t do so well over there.” But “they have a perfect tape, obviously done by a government camera, and the tape is of the people taking the money off the plane. It’s a military tape. It’s a tape that was a perfect angle, nice and steady.”
No publicly available video matches what Trump described. This raises the possibility that Trump was either fabricating the contents of a non-existent video, or he was disclosing information to which he has newly been granted access.
Trump’s description of the “top secret” tape came just days after the Republican presidential nominee became eligible to receive classified intelligence briefings ― a privilege afforded to the nominees of the two major political parties in order to prepare them, should they win the White House.
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign declined to say how Trump acquired the video.
A spokesman for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the group that handles classified national security briefings for presidential candidates, did not immediately respond to a question about whether Trump has been briefed by the agency.
But both Trump and Clinton are eligible for classified briefings now that they have secured their parties’ nominations, James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said late last month after the presidential conventions. The Atlantic’s Russell Berman reported Wednesday that Trump and Clinton could begin receiving briefings “as soon as the coming days.”
The vividness of Trump’s description of the video makes it difficult to imagine a scenario in which he made it up. He described how the video was shot by a steady hand. “Nobody getting nervous they’re going to be shot because they’re taking a picture of money pouring off a plane.”
Trump continued: “Iran released that tape, which is of quality like these guys have,” he said, pointing to the media in the back of the room. “Iran released that tape so that we will be embarrassed.”
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.
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