President Donald Trump showed a classified map he retained from his first term in office to passengers on a 2022 private plane flight and retained another record so sensitive that only six high-ranking government officials had access to it, according to a prosecution memo released to Congress this week.
The Justice Department shared those findings, detailed in a January 2023 briefing document written by then-special counsel Jack Smith’s team, with lawmakers as they conduct a review of Smith’s efforts now-abandoned efforts to prosecute Trump.
The memo, which was obtained by The Washington Post, was penned as investigators moved toward indicting Trump on charges of illegally retaining sensitive government material after he left the White House. It offers a snapshot of an early moment in Smith’s investigation and adds new shading to the public understanding of Smith’s probes, even as a final report on his findings remains under court seal.
The memo, for instance, reveals that Smith’s team gathered at least some evidence to suggest that Trump had retained classified material pertinent to his personal business interests and that prosecutors were investigating whether his decision to hold on to those records was motivated by financial gain.
The eventual indictment — filed against Trump five months after the memo was written — did not mention Trump’s business interests as a possible motive. That could suggest prosecutors ultimately concluded they did not have sufficient evidence to prove that theory at trial. It is also not uncommon for prosecutors to leave some allegations out of their initial charging documents, even if they intend to prove them later at trial.
The memo recounts an alleged incident in which Trump, on a June 2022 flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, allegedly shared a classified map with passengers. Among them, according to the memo, was Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Trump’s super PAC, who has since become Trump’s White House chief of staff. The memo did not detail what the map showed.
Smith’s 2023 indictment of Trump included a similar claim that Trump in 2021 had shown others a classified map tied to a military operation and boasted that he had access to a “plan of attack” that the Pentagon had prepared for him.
Trump has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and maintained that he was entitled to keep classified records when he left the White House in 2021. The case Smith filed against him was dismissed by a federal judge in Florida, who cited issues with Smith’s appointment as special counsel, before it could go to trial.
Smith was appealing that decision when Trump was elected to a second term in 2024, prompting him to abandon his efforts in line with Justice Department policies preventing the prosecution of a sitting president.
The White House did not immediately respond Wednesday to requests for comment on the conclusions detailed in the newly released memo.
Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, cited the memo in a Wednesday letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi in which he demanded more information on its allegations, including a full manifesto of the passengers aboard Trump’s plane for that 2022 flight.
“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,” Raskin wrote. “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.”
Smith has been largely barred from publicly discussing the efforts of his investigative team in the classified-documents investigation. Last year, U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon — the same judge who dismissed the case — issued an order preventing the release of Smith’s final report on the probe, saying doing so would unfairly damage the rights of people, including Trump, who had not been convicted at trial.
She made that order permanent at the request of Trump and his former co-defendants last month and additionally barred the public release of “any information or conclusions” from Smith’s findings in the classified-documents case.
Raskin suggested Wednesday that the Justice Department may have inadvertently included Smith’s memo in a larger batch of documents from Smith’s investigations of Trump that it has released in coordination with congressional Republicans over the past year.
Since Trump’s return to the White House, House and Senate Republicans have released scores of what Raskin described Wednesday as “cherry-picked” records from Smith’s probes in an effort to discredit his work as politically motivated.
Released documents have included records revealing that Smith’s team — as part of its separate investigation of Trump’s efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election — sought phone records from Republican senators and Trump allies including Wiles and Kash Patel, now FBI director, during the years Trump was out of office.
Republicans have sought to paint that move as evidence Smith was pursuing a partisan vendetta. But the former special counsel has defended the decision as a routine investigative step as he was building a conspiracy case against Trump and investigating whom he was communicating with in the weeks after his election loss.
Raskin, in his letter to Bondi on Wednesday, suggested the coordinated dissemination of documents from Smith’s probes by the Justice Department and congressional Republicans in recent months has violated the spirit — and possibly the letter — of Cannon’s orders.
“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,” he wrote.
A Justice Department spokesperson rejected that assertion in a statement dismissing Raskin’s letter as little more than “a cheap political stunt.”
“We understand that [Raskin], much like Jack Smith, is blinded by hatred of President Trump,” it read. “However, he needs to get his facts straight — this Department of Justice is the most transparent in history in part because of our efforts to expose the weaponization of the Biden administration in full compliance with the law and the court.”
For his own part, Smith in testimony before Congress earlier this year defended his investigations and stood by his conclusion that Trump “willfully broke the very laws that he took an oath to uphold.”
“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat,” Smith told members of the House Judiciary Committee in January. “No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account. So that is what I did.”
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