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Audio of Trump Recommends 'Attacking' Iran

Former President Donald Trump at a Republican dinner in Michigan on Sunday. (Reuters)
Former President Donald Trump at a Republican dinner in Michigan on Sunday. (Reuters)
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Audio of Trump Recommends 'Attacking' Iran

Former President Donald Trump at a Republican dinner in Michigan on Sunday. (Reuters)
Former President Donald Trump at a Republican dinner in Michigan on Sunday. (Reuters)

Former US President Donald Trump is back at the news front after an audio recording was leaked of a 2021 meeting in New Jersey where he discusses holding secret documents he did not declassify.

During the two-minute audio, Trump is heard discussing a secret Pentagon plan to attack Iran, hinting that Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley was the one who planned the attack.

"He said that I wanted to attack Iran. Isn't it amazing?"

In the audio, Trump is shuffling through papers, saying: "I have a big pile of papers. This thing just came up. Look. This was him. They presented me this – this is off the record, but – they presented me this. This was him. This was the Defense Department and him."

It is customary for the Pentagon to present military plans to the US President as Commander of the Armed Forces as part of a set of preventive plans that depend on several options offered in issues relating to national security.

The recording sheds light on Trump's legal troubles. "As president, I could have declassified it," Trump says. "Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret."

The audio is an implicit admission that he did not declassify the documents during his term, contrary to the previous claims.

Without a doubt, the new recording will form the basis of the prosecution's arguments in the classified documents case, in which Trump faces 37 counts related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents kept at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.

Meanwhile, several Republicans who support the former president in Congress seek to "clear" his record in the House of Representatives, which approved measures to impeach him twice while he was president.

Congresswomen Elise Stefanik and Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced resolutions to formally expunge the impeachments of Trump as if such Articles of Impeachment had never passed the full House of Representatives.

The project puts Republican leaders in an awkward position, as putting it to a vote will force conservative Republicans to take a public stance towards Trump at a time when the former president faces criminal charges and official investigations.

But Republicans who support Trump seek to show their support and loyalty in various ways, including putting forward another project to nullify the first impeachment measures in 2019.

They point out that the procedures did not include holding any congressional hearings on the issue and that the vote was only two days after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put it forward to score political gains.

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Huge Power Outage Paralyzes Parts of Spain and Portugal

This photograph shows a flamenco dress factory without light and workers during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France, in Seville on April 28, 2025. (AFP)
This photograph shows a flamenco dress factory without light and workers during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France, in Seville on April 28, 2025. (AFP)
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Huge Power Outage Paralyzes Parts of Spain and Portugal

This photograph shows a flamenco dress factory without light and workers during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France, in Seville on April 28, 2025. (AFP)
This photograph shows a flamenco dress factory without light and workers during a massive power cut affecting the entire Iberian peninsula and the south of France, in Seville on April 28, 2025. (AFP)

A huge power outage hit large parts of Spain and Portugal on Monday, paralyzing traffic, grounding flights, trapping people in elevators and leaving power operators scrambling to restore power to millions of homes and businesses.

Some hospitals halted routine work and the two countries' governments convened emergency cabinet meetings, with officials initially saying a possible cyber-attack could not be ruled out. Outages on such a scale are extremely rare in Europe, and the cause could not immediately be established.

Reuters witnesses said power had started returning to the Basque country and Barcelona areas of Spain in the early afternoon, a few hours after the outage began. It was not clear when power might be more widely restored.

Hospitals in Madrid and Cataluna in Spain suspended all routine medical work but were still attending to critical patients, using backup generators. Several Spanish oil refineries were shut down and retail businesses shut.

The Bank of Spain said electronic banking was functioning "adequately" on backup systems, though residents also reported ATM screens had gone blank.

"I'm in a data center, and everything has gone off. All the alarms popped up, and now we're with the groups, waiting to find out what happened," said Barcelona resident and engineer Jose Maria Espejo, 40.

In a video posted on X, Madrid Mayor Jose Luis Martinez-Almeida urged city residents to minimize their journeys and stay where they were, adding: "It is essential that the emergency services can circulate."

In Portugal, water supplier EPAL said water supplies could also be disrupted, and queues formed at stores by people rushing to purchase emergency supplies like gaslights, generators and batteries.

The main Portuguese electricity utility, EDP, said it had told customers it had no forecast for when the energy supply would be "normalized", Publico newspaper said. It warned it could take several hours.

Parts of France also suffered a brief outage. RTE, the French grid operator, said it had moved to supplement power to some parts of northern Spain after the outage hit.

Play at the Madrid Open tennis tournament was suspended, forcing 15th seed Grigor Dimitrov and British opponent Jacob Fearnley off the court as scoreboards went dark and overhead cameras lost power.

TRAFFIC JAMS

Spanish radio stations said part of the Madrid underground was being evacuated. There were traffic jams in Madrid city center as traffic lights stopped working, Cader Ser Radio station reported.

Hundreds of people stood outside office buildings on Madrid’s streets and there was a heavy police presence around key buildings, directing traffic as well as driving along central atriums with lights, according to a Reuters witness.

One of four tower buildings in Madrid that houses the British Embassy had been evacuated, the witness added.

Local radio reported people trapped in stalled metro cars and elevators.

Portuguese police said traffic lights were affected across the country, the metro was closed in Lisbon and Porto, and trains were not running.

Lisbon's subway transport operator Metropolitano de Lisboa said the subway was at a standstill with people still inside the trains, according to Publico newspaper.

A source at Portugal's TAP Air said Lisbon airport was running on back-up generators, while AENA, which manages 46 airports in Spain, reported flight delays around the country.

Such widespread outages are unusual in Europe. In 2003 a problem with a hydroelectric power line between Italy and Switzerland caused a major outage across the whole Italian peninsula for around 12 hours.

In 2006 an overloaded power network in Germany caused electricity cuts across parts of the country and in France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands and as far as Morocco.