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Newly released case records show Jack Smith found Trump had a business motive for keeping classified documents
Ana Cabrera @AnaCabreraNEW: Trump had business motive for keeping classified documents, Jack Smith finds
The special counsel’s team found Donald Trump held onto documents so secret only six people could legally review them — and believed his reason for doing so was personal financial gain.
Mar. 25, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT
by Carol Leonnig and Jacqueline Alemany
___Special counsel Jack Smith gathered evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump took many top secret documents that related to his worldwide business interests, and investigators considered this a likely motive for Trump concealing them at his Florida club after he left the White House, according to newly released case records.
The special prosecutor also had evidence indicating that after leaving office Trump had shown a classified map to passengers on a private plane, including his future chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and took at least one document that was so secret that only six people had authority to review it, according to a memo reviewed by MS NOW and cited by the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.
In a January 2023 “progress memo” reviewed by MS NOW, Smith’s office discussed the possible motive after the FBI discovered that Trump held on to many documents related to his businesses.
“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” according to the memo, which tracked progress in the documents and election-interference investigations. “We must have those documents.”
read more: https://www.ms.now/news/trump-classified-documents-smith-investigation-business-motive
___The disclosure, made to the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into the probes into Trump, offers new details about the types of records the president took with him to Florida after losing the 2020 election.
The files shared with Congress include a January 2023 memo of work on Smith’s team. Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) also shared them on Tuesday.
In it, agents are seen discussing the need to secure permission to show the classified documents at trial, arguing that Trump’s business interest in the documents indicates his motive, while the closely held documents show the highly sensitive nature of the materials. The memo does not provide further specifics about the contents of the classified documents.
“Most damning is what these documents, cherry-picked by your own DOJ for disclosure, show about President Trump’s conduct,” Raskin wrote in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, going to quote from the memo from Smith’s team.
The “FBI has also found that certain classified documents President Trump improperly retained ‘would be pertinent to certain business interests.’ DOJ prosecutors further assessed that these ‘classified documents pertinent to his business interests’ established ‘a motive for retaining them,” Raskin wrote.
“The memorandum further specifies that the disclosure of these documents represented ‘an aggravated potential harm to national security.’ The prosecutors also wrote that these were ‘highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have.’ One ‘particularly sensitive document was accessible by only 6? people, including the president.’”
At another point in the memo, prosecutors discuss Trump showing a classified map to passengers traveling with him aboard a flight, including his now chief of staff Susie Wiles.
https://thehill.com/homenews/5799507-trump-classified-documents-mar-a-lago-smith-memo/
Raskin letter to Bondi: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/27905007-2026-03-24-raskin-to-bondi-doj-re-classified-docs/
March 24, 2026The Honorable Pamela J. BondiAttorney GeneralU.S. Department of Justice950 Pennsylvania Avenue, NWWashington, DC 20530Attorney General Bondi:
We have long known that, as he left office in 2021, President Donald Trump stole classified documents, hoarded them in the ballrooms and bathrooms of his Mar-a-Lago clubhouse, defied subpoenas, and obstructed law enforcement. One lingering question has been: why? Why would Donald Trump go to such extraordinary lengths to steal classified documents, hoard them, and refuse to return them? Together with Donald Trump, your Department of Justice (DOJ) has been fighting tooth and nail to gag Special Counsel Jack Smith and bury his report in order to cover-up the answer to this key question.
For the past year, DOJ has been working with Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee to wage a campaign of retribution against career prosecutors and federal agents who did their duty, followed the facts and the law, and investigated Donald Trump both for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and for hiding and lying about the classified documents he stole. As part of this effort, DOJ earlier this month produced yet another set of cherry-picked documents relating to Jack Smith’s Arctic Frost and Plasmic Echo investigations. Apparently blinded by the frenzied search to find any scrap of evidence that could be twisted and distorted to level an attack against Special Counsel Smith (despite constantly coming up empty-handed), you have, quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct and may well violate the gag order your DOJ and Donald Trump demanded from Judge Aileen Cannon.
These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump’s super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classifiedmap to passengers on his private plane. This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.
When Special Counsel Smith and his deputies appeared before Congress, they could not answer this Committee’s questions about the classified documents case, under threat of potential federal prosecution, because of the gag order Judge Cannon issued at the request of Donald Trump. Judge Cannon’s Protective Order broadly prevents the “[d]isclosure to the Public” of any discovery materials or “any information derived there from.” Mr. Smith’s authorization letter from DOJ expressly prohibited him from discussing “Volume II of the Special Counsel’s report, and any information or conclusions in the Volume II or in drafts thereof.”
DOJ clearly does not view itself as bound by these same restrictions. On the afternoon of Friday, March 13, DOJ produced several documents involving the classified documents case to the House Committee on the Judiciary, including non-public information apparently barred from release by Judge Cannon’s order. What is more, a significant portion of the pages in one production are marked “Contains 6(e) and Sealed Material”—material that would be a crime for DOJ prosecutors to disclose to third parties, including to Congress. This document not only seemingly actually contains grand jury material, it obliterates the government’s own argument before Judge Cannon that a “careful Rule 6(e) review is no longer feasible given … the departures of Special Counsel Smith and his team from the Department of Justice.” In short, the position of the DOJ appears to be that it can violate Judge Cannon’s order and grand jury secrecy whenever it sees an opportunity to smear Jack Smith.
Most damning is what these documents, cherry-picked by your own DOJ for disclosure,show about President Trump’s conduct. They include a January 13, 2023, memorandum, inwhich prosecutors wrote that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has determined that the classified documents President Trump retained from the White House “were commingled with documents created after Trump left office.” FBI has also found that certain classified documents President Trump improperly retained “would be pertinent to certain business interests.” DOJ prosecutors further assessed that these “classified documents pertinent to his business interests” established “a motive for retaining them. We must have those documents.”
The memorandum further specifies that the disclosure of these documents represented“an aggravated potential harm to national security.” The prosecutors also wrote that these were “highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have.” One “particularly sensitive document was accessible by only 6? people, including the president.”
The memorandum also details the extent to which the President and his staff acted recklessly with our nation’s most sensitive secrets. A then-23-year-old Trump aide and currentDirector of Oval Office Operations, Chamberlain Harris, “scanned” the contents of one box onto her laptop and retained it for nearly two years. Ms. Harris also “uploaded the scan to a cloud.”A Trump lawyer had to retrieve this scan from Ms. Harris’s laptop and then fly on a commercialairline with the thumb drive containing the classified documents. DOJ redacted the subsequent text in the memorandum, so we are unable to determine the full extent of this incident or whether these documents were compromised.
Similarly, in June 2022, President Trump apparently took classified documents on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, NJ. Prosecutors determined that they “identified a classified map that we believe Trump may have shown to individuals on board” that airplane and that their investigation “indicates that Susan Wiles, the CEO of Trump’s Super PAC was aboard that flight and witnessed this event.” The memorandum does not specify who else might have seenthis document. DOJ produced a map of the aircraft, enclosed with this letter, but with all names of passengers redacted.
Without access to Volume II of the Special Counsel’s final report or the investigative files, we do not know what that classified map contained, nor can we determine from this memo the relationship between the classified documents President Trump stole and their pertinence to his “business interests.” We do know that around the time of this flight to Bedminster, President Trump was entering into partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and state-linked real estate firm Dar al Arkan. A month after this flight, in July 2022, President Trump played golf at Bedminster with Yasir al-Rumayyan, head of the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia—the same official who plied the Trump family with tens of millions of dollars as the family began torun out of money between terms.
During this trip, President Trump defended his business partners from criticism levied by the families of 9/11 victims protesting the Saudi government’srole in the attack, saying inaccurately that “nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11, unfortunately.” We also know that there are reports that Donald Trump, at one point while on the phone with his ghost-writer, “made a reference to having classified records relating to the bombing of Iran.” He also reportedly boasted that it was only the hawks who wanted to attack Iran, not him, and that he had Pentagon war plans “done by the military and given to me” about such a potential attack.
If this map is related to our military posture in the Middle East, and it was in fact shown to any foreign official, Saudi or otherwise, that would amount to an unforgiveable betrayal of ourmen and women in uniform who are currently valiantly fighting in President Trump’s disastrous war against Iran.
It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses. It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them. Our country is at war, American lives are at stake, and the answer to these questions has never been more pressing.
Accordingly, please provide detailed answers to the following questions by 5:00 p.m. on March 31, 2026, all of which are required to understand the full context of the documents your DOJ itself produced. Should any of the answers to these questions require the exposure of classified information or information which could harm the national security of the United States and its servicemembers, Members and staff stand ready to receive that information in a SensitiveCompartmented Information Facility (SCIF).
1. Who else was on the plane with President Trump from Florida to Bedminster, New Jersey on June 3, 2022?
2. Who on that plane did President Trump show the classified map to? Did the Special Counsel’s Office find any evidence that President Trump showed the map to anyone else?
3. What did the classified map detail?
4. Which documents did President Trump improperly retain that were pertinent to his business interests, and which specific business interests?
5. Which members of President Trump’s family engaged in his business ventures saw or were made aware of the content of these classified documents? Please specifically reference Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Barron Trump in your answer.
6. Which document did President Trump steal that was so sensitive that only six people in the entire federal government had access to it?
7. Did any of the documents President Trump stole or showed to other individuals after your term in office relate to the U.S. government’s war plans in the MiddleEast?
8. Did any foreign actors access, or attempt to access, these classified documents, either in their paper form or when uploaded to staffers’ computers? If so, which foreign actors?
In addition, DOJ must cease cherry-picking investigative materials and produce all remaining investigative files, including memoranda, emails, and analyses prepared by the Special Counsel’s Office by 5:00 p.m. on April 14, 2026. As a matter of priority, DOJ must produce the unredacted seating chart of the aircraft, the redacted version of which is enclosed with this letter, and the full, unredacted January 13, 2023, memo at DOJ-JSAF-031326-000085 to DOJ-JSAF-031326-000096, subject to all rules regarding grand jury secrecy.
Thank you for your attention to these important oversight requests. I look forward to your prompt attention to this grave matter.
Very truly yours,________________________Jamie Raskin Ranking Member
We have long known that, as he left office in 2021, President Donald Trump stole classified documents, hoarded them in the ballrooms and bathrooms of his Mar-a-Lago clubhouse, defied subpoenas, and obstructed law enforcement. One lingering question has been: why? Why would Donald Trump go to such extraordinary lengths to steal classified documents, hoard them, and refuse to return them? Together with Donald Trump, your Department of Justice (DOJ) has been fighting tooth and nail to gag Special Counsel Jack Smith and bury his report in order to cover-up the answer to this key question.
For the past year, DOJ has been working with Republicans of the House Judiciary Committee to wage a campaign of retribution against career prosecutors and federal agents who did their duty, followed the facts and the law, and investigated Donald Trump both for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and for hiding and lying about the classified documents he stole. As part of this effort, DOJ earlier this month produced yet another set of cherry-picked documents relating to Jack Smith’s Arctic Frost and Plasmic Echo investigations. Apparently blinded by the frenzied search to find any scrap of evidence that could be twisted and distorted to level an attack against Special Counsel Smith (despite constantly coming up empty-handed), you have, quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct and may well violate the gag order your DOJ and Donald Trump demanded from Judge Aileen Cannon.
These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump’s super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classifiedmap to passengers on his private plane. This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.
When Special Counsel Smith and his deputies appeared before Congress, they could not answer this Committee’s questions about the classified documents case, under threat of potential federal prosecution, because of the gag order Judge Cannon issued at the request of Donald Trump. Judge Cannon’s Protective Order broadly prevents the “[d]isclosure to the Public” of any discovery materials or “any information derived there from.” Mr. Smith’s authorization letter from DOJ expressly prohibited him from discussing “Volume II of the Special Counsel’s report, and any information or conclusions in the Volume II or in drafts thereof.”
DOJ clearly does not view itself as bound by these same restrictions. On the afternoon of Friday, March 13, DOJ produced several documents involving the classified documents case to the House Committee on the Judiciary, including non-public information apparently barred from release by Judge Cannon’s order. What is more, a significant portion of the pages in one production are marked “Contains 6(e) and Sealed Material”—material that would be a crime for DOJ prosecutors to disclose to third parties, including to Congress. This document not only seemingly actually contains grand jury material, it obliterates the government’s own argument before Judge Cannon that a “careful Rule 6(e) review is no longer feasible given … the departures of Special Counsel Smith and his team from the Department of Justice.” In short, the position of the DOJ appears to be that it can violate Judge Cannon’s order and grand jury secrecy whenever it sees an opportunity to smear Jack Smith.
Most damning is what these documents, cherry-picked by your own DOJ for disclosure,show about President Trump’s conduct. They include a January 13, 2023, memorandum, inwhich prosecutors wrote that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has determined that the classified documents President Trump retained from the White House “were commingled with documents created after Trump left office.” FBI has also found that certain classified documents President Trump improperly retained “would be pertinent to certain business interests.” DOJ prosecutors further assessed that these “classified documents pertinent to his business interests” established “a motive for retaining them. We must have those documents.”
The memorandum further specifies that the disclosure of these documents represented“an aggravated potential harm to national security.” The prosecutors also wrote that these were “highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have.” One “particularly sensitive document was accessible by only 6? people, including the president.”
The memorandum also details the extent to which the President and his staff acted recklessly with our nation’s most sensitive secrets. A then-23-year-old Trump aide and currentDirector of Oval Office Operations, Chamberlain Harris, “scanned” the contents of one box onto her laptop and retained it for nearly two years. Ms. Harris also “uploaded the scan to a cloud.”A Trump lawyer had to retrieve this scan from Ms. Harris’s laptop and then fly on a commercialairline with the thumb drive containing the classified documents. DOJ redacted the subsequent text in the memorandum, so we are unable to determine the full extent of this incident or whether these documents were compromised.
Similarly, in June 2022, President Trump apparently took classified documents on a flight to his golf club in Bedminster, NJ. Prosecutors determined that they “identified a classified map that we believe Trump may have shown to individuals on board” that airplane and that their investigation “indicates that Susan Wiles, the CEO of Trump’s Super PAC was aboard that flight and witnessed this event.” The memorandum does not specify who else might have seenthis document. DOJ produced a map of the aircraft, enclosed with this letter, but with all names of passengers redacted.
Without access to Volume II of the Special Counsel’s final report or the investigative files, we do not know what that classified map contained, nor can we determine from this memo the relationship between the classified documents President Trump stole and their pertinence to his “business interests.” We do know that around the time of this flight to Bedminster, President Trump was entering into partnerships with Saudi-backed LIV Golf and state-linked real estate firm Dar al Arkan. A month after this flight, in July 2022, President Trump played golf at Bedminster with Yasir al-Rumayyan, head of the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia—the same official who plied the Trump family with tens of millions of dollars as the family began torun out of money between terms.
During this trip, President Trump defended his business partners from criticism levied by the families of 9/11 victims protesting the Saudi government’srole in the attack, saying inaccurately that “nobody’s gotten to the bottom of 9/11, unfortunately.” We also know that there are reports that Donald Trump, at one point while on the phone with his ghost-writer, “made a reference to having classified records relating to the bombing of Iran.” He also reportedly boasted that it was only the hawks who wanted to attack Iran, not him, and that he had Pentagon war plans “done by the military and given to me” about such a potential attack.
If this map is related to our military posture in the Middle East, and it was in fact shown to any foreign official, Saudi or otherwise, that would amount to an unforgiveable betrayal of ourmen and women in uniform who are currently valiantly fighting in President Trump’s disastrous war against Iran.
It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses. It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them. Our country is at war, American lives are at stake, and the answer to these questions has never been more pressing.
Accordingly, please provide detailed answers to the following questions by 5:00 p.m. on March 31, 2026, all of which are required to understand the full context of the documents your DOJ itself produced. Should any of the answers to these questions require the exposure of classified information or information which could harm the national security of the United States and its servicemembers, Members and staff stand ready to receive that information in a SensitiveCompartmented Information Facility (SCIF).
1. Who else was on the plane with President Trump from Florida to Bedminster, New Jersey on June 3, 2022?
2. Who on that plane did President Trump show the classified map to? Did the Special Counsel’s Office find any evidence that President Trump showed the map to anyone else?
3. What did the classified map detail?
4. Which documents did President Trump improperly retain that were pertinent to his business interests, and which specific business interests?
5. Which members of President Trump’s family engaged in his business ventures saw or were made aware of the content of these classified documents? Please specifically reference Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Barron Trump in your answer.
6. Which document did President Trump steal that was so sensitive that only six people in the entire federal government had access to it?
7. Did any of the documents President Trump stole or showed to other individuals after your term in office relate to the U.S. government’s war plans in the MiddleEast?
8. Did any foreign actors access, or attempt to access, these classified documents, either in their paper form or when uploaded to staffers’ computers? If so, which foreign actors?
In addition, DOJ must cease cherry-picking investigative materials and produce all remaining investigative files, including memoranda, emails, and analyses prepared by the Special Counsel’s Office by 5:00 p.m. on April 14, 2026. As a matter of priority, DOJ must produce the unredacted seating chart of the aircraft, the redacted version of which is enclosed with this letter, and the full, unredacted January 13, 2023, memo at DOJ-JSAF-031326-000085 to DOJ-JSAF-031326-000096, subject to all rules regarding grand jury secrecy.
Thank you for your attention to these important oversight requests. I look forward to your prompt attention to this grave matter.
Very truly yours,________________________Jamie Raskin Ranking Member
41 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
(You left out "traitor" and "thief." I fixed it. 
)
Like so much of America and the world, I have a SEEETHING hatred of that creature who calls himself "president," as if he is due some modicum of respect. He deserves NOTHING but the CONTEMPT of humanity.
We all knew why he kept (stole) the documents. He did it for the same reason he does everything.
Profit motive, money in his pocket. Ka-Ching!
This is too important to be forgotten in his avalanche of shit 💩 🤬 The prosecution must be pursued in January 2029 under a Democratic administration.
WHY is no amount of money EVER enough??? 
As if one had to ask.
CORRUPTION that is basically STEALING from the American taxpayer -- our dollars are stuffing his fat greedy pockets instead of benefitting us. Where's the fucking outrage???
