Donald Trump heads to South Carolina rally under mountain of pressure

Former President Donald Trump is set to take part in a 2024 campaign rally in Pickens, South Carolina, on Saturday as he continues to face increasing legal pressure as part of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case.

Among the guest speakers for Saturday’s event include South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster, Senator Lindsey Graham, and Representatives William Timmons and Russell Fry.

Trump’s latest campaign rally comes as the former president has had a particularly turbulent week after CNN published leaked audio that showed him admitting he had retained secret papers after he left the White House in January 2021, and that he no longer had the power to declassify it.

In the 2-minute clip, which was first aired to the public on Anderson Cooper 360 on Monday evening, Trump can be heard during a July 2021 meeting at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, how he was in possession of a “highly confidential” Pentagon paper about a potential attack on Iran.

During the meeting, Trump tells those present that “as president, I could have declassified” the document. “Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.”

The remarks cast doubt on the former president’s defense that he had declassified all the documents and sensitive information before he left office, including those recovered from his Mar-a-Lago resort residence in Florida last August by the FBI. The tape also raises speculation that Trump may have shown off classified materials to people who did not have clearance to view them.

The remarks are believed to be the same ones which were previously cited in the federal indictment against Trump, which was unsealed prior to him pleading not guilty to 37 charges in a Miami courthouse earlier this month as part of the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) and special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation.

Following the emergence of the audio, Trump denied that he had a classified document during the July 2021 meeting involving people working on the memoir of his former chief of staff Mark Meadows and aides of the former president.

Speaking to Fox News one day after CNN first aired the audio, Trump said the sound of rustling papers, which can be heard on the tape, were mostly “newspaper articles, copies of magazines, copies of different plans” that he kept on his desk.

The former president also dismissed the DOJ’s investigation into him as a “witch hunt” during a campaign event in New Hampshire on Tuesday.

“Every time the radical left Democrats, Marxists, communists and fascists indict me, I consider it a badge—great, great, beautiful badge of honor and courage,” Trump said at the New Hampshire Federation of Republican Women’s annual Lilac luncheon in Concord. “Because I’m being indicted for you.”

A spokesperson for Trump’s campaign added that the audio recording “provides context proving, once again, that President Trump did nothing wrong at all.”

“The media and the Trump-haters once again were all too willing to take the bait, falling for another Democrat-DOJ hoax, hook, line, and sinker,” the spokesperson previously told Newsweek.

Newsweek reached out to Trump’s campaign for additional comment via email.