At once the most vivid — to the ear, at least — and most mysterious of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s accusations against President Trump is the allegation that the former president displayed what the prosecutor calls a “plan of attack” against Iran to a coterie of advisers. The incident is not just a potential stand-alone crime, but also a kind of stand-in for Mr. Smith’s theory of the case — that Mr. Trump brazenly “put at risk the national security of the United States.”  

Mr. Trump, though, claims that he never shared the plan — that his reference to it was mere “bravado.” The admission suggests that Mr. Trump recognizes a smoking gun — or, say, disclosing plans to bombard Tehran — when he sees one. In an audio recording disclosed by CNN that memorializes the exchange, he calls the document “highly confidential” and “secret.” Now, he argues that was simply bluster.  

The Iran colloquy is the first one mentioned in Mr. Smith’s indictment, but it strangely fails to reappear in the list of charges at the end of the document. The 31 counts cover a raft of records recovered from Mar-a-Lago, but none from Bedminster. Mr. Smith apparently believed the conversation is material to his prosecution of Mr. Trump, but for some unexplained reason decided against charging it.

While the Sun has reported on the possibility that a separate New Jersey-based indictment could be in the works, including the alleged attack plan could present difficulties even if Mr. Smith homes in on the Garden State. For one, he does not have the document in hand. There was no warrant-powered search of Bedminster, meaning the special counsel lacks access to the same physical evidence he accrued at Mar-a-Lago. 

For his part, Mr. Trump has said he does not know where the document is, or if it even exists. One of his sometime advisers, Kash Patel, told the New York Post that he confronted Mr. Smith’s attorneys about the “Iran attack document” by saying “show me the document you guys are referring to,” to which prosecutors responded, “We don’t have it.” 

Mr. Patel surmises that Mr. Trump was merely joking and attempting to “put people at ease” during the now notorious conversation at Bedminster. Another onetime aide, Ric Grenell, who was acting director of American intelligence in 2020 as well as ambassador to Germany, hypothesizes that Mr. Trump was merely referring to an article in the New Yorker. 

The indictment states in no uncertain terms, though, that Mr. Trump “showed classified information to others,” among these others a “writer, publisher, and two members of his staff.” The Bedminster conversation was, reportedly, centered on discussing material for the memoir of a one-time chief of staff to Mr. Trump, Mark Meadows, titled, “The Chief’s Chief.”  

Mr. Trump’s attorneys, on the other hand, are likely to argue that the audio is unreliable in context if not content, as the papers could have been, as Mr. Trump explains, innocuous “magazines, newspapers, plans of buildings. I had plans of buildings. You know, building plans? I had plans of a golf course.”

It could be, though, that Mr. Smith will not need the document to exist at all. In the tape, Mr. Trump  admits, “See as president I could have declassified it. Now I can’t, you know, but this is still a secret.” Even if he was waving plans for an 18th hole, such an admission would suggest a mind cognizant of culpability. The actual paper could be beside the point.  

Such a showing of intention would be required for a jury to convict Mr. Trump, as the crime of  gathering, transmitting, or losing defense information — charged in the indictment — requires that the defendant “willfully communicates, delivers, transmits” the contraband information, which in this case would be the minutiae of military action. 

If, that is, the document disclosing them ever existed.