On defense?
On the Thursday, September 14, episode of Anderson Cooper 360, New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman discussed Donald Trump's interview with Megyn Kelly alongside host Anderson Cooper.
The conversation between reporters focused in on the former president's reaction when he was grilled about his alleged mishandling of classified documents.
"He also spoke with Megyn Kelly for her podcast about the incident that we all know about now, where he was waving around classified documents. Let's play this," Cooper began.
"What were you waving around in that meeting because it certainly sounded like it was an attack?" Kelly said in the clip, to which Trump replied, "I'm not going to talk to you about that. I'm allowed to have those documents."
Kelly pushed back at the 2024 presidential hopeful, saying, "But once you get a subpoena, you have to turn them over."
"I know this," he responded. "I don't even know that because I have the right to have those documents. So I don't really know that."
Kelly then asked: "Do you believe that every CIA document that came to you as president was automatically yours to keep no matter what?"
"I'm not going to answer that question," Trump said, before the footage of the interview ended.
Cooper jumped in stating, "Interesting. He says, I'm not going to talk about it but he does talk about it."
Haberman explained, "Well, there — as you and I both know, there are times he can't help but feel like he has to defend himself and that has been his defense, is to keep saying, these are my documents. These documents, in fact, belong to the government. And he repeatedly misstates what the Presidential Records Act says."
"I mean, whether or not it gets adjudicated on his side, what he is saying is not correct. But it is notable that he is steering away from answering that question more fully than, say, what he did with Bret Baier a couple months ago," she continued.
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"He rarely does that, you know, I'm not going to answer that," Cooper pointed out.
"He rarely does that unless he feels like he is entering danger territory and it means he was more on guard despite everything we saw him say. He was more on guard in this interview than I think people realize," Haberman insisted.
