Special counsel Jack Smith strongly suspected that President Donald Trump took some classified records after he left office in 2021 because they could help him financially, but Smith and his team later concluded they could not prove this was his motive, MS NOW has learned.
Early in his tenure, Smith was “laser-focused” on establishing whether financial gain was one of Trump’s driving motives in taking and concealing classified documents after he left the White House, according to two people familiar with the case. The special counsel tasked his team with tracking down the connection between some documents in Trump’s possession which, according to an internal memo MS NOW obtained, contained intelligence related to Trump’s businesses.
But by late spring and early summer of 2023, as Smith’s team was secretly presenting evidence to a grand jury in Florida about Trump’s mishandling of these top-secret records, Smith and his prosecutors determined their clearest conclusion was that Trump kept the records out of an egotistical belief that he should be allowed to keep them — and also that the records were “cool” to have, the people said.
A January 2023 case memo that MS NOW obtained this week revived the long-simmering questions about what motivated Trump to take hundreds of pages of top-secret records when he lost his re-election bid. The special counsel’s office memo said the FBI found numerous records in its 2022 search at Mar-a-Lago that were connected to Trump’s business interests, and said it established a financial motive as a reason Trump kept them.
The law doesn’t require establishing a person’s motive in order to convict them of the crime of mishandling classified records, but like any prosecutors, Smith and his team were keen to determine it and describe it to a jury at trial, according to the people, who asked to speak confidentially to discuss a sensitive probe.
The memo was written in Smith’s early days in office to prepare Smith to brief then-Attorney General Merrick Garland on the investigation’s progress. The memo said the briefing was scheduled for Jan. 13, 2023.
Smith’s team planned to update the attorney general on investigative steps they took, meetings they had with FBI supervisors in the Washington field office and the priority investigative tasks they later gave the investigators.
“After that, we tasked the FBI with two priority projects — 1) determine whether any of the classified documents were commingled with documents created post-presidency; and 2) determine whether any of the classified documents relate to Trump business/financial dealings,” the memo said.
The memo went on to relay that the FBI had already found evidence of both kinds in the classified records recovered from Mar-a-Lago: documents that related to Trump’s businesses and highly sensitive documents commingled with standard papers added after Trump left office. Smith’s team wrote that it was critical to convince U.S. intelligence agency leaders to let them use some of these documents in their prosecution; such records would help prove Trump knew he possessed classified records and reveal his motive to keep them.
“Trump also had classified documents commingled with documents created after Trump left office — we must have those documents to prove knowledge,” the memo said. “And Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them. We must have those documents.”
But after copious work by Smith’s team, the people said, prosecutors increasingly believed the most they could prove was that Trump erroneously believed he should be allowed to keep any record he wanted and some of the documents were simply “cool.”
For example, investigators were surprised to learn Trump asked his briefers if he could keep the leather-bound covers of some of his classified briefings that carried the embossed title, “The President,” according to one person familiar with the finding. Ultimately, the January 2023 memo provides an early snapshot of Smith’s case at a moment in time, just eight weeks after Garland appointed him special counsel. While it mentions Trump’s potential motive, it also mentions evidence the team gathered, including that Trump ally Susie Wiles witnessed Trump showing a classified map to passengers on a private plane. Later in the investigation, prosecutors learned that Wiles, who would become Trump’s White House chief of staff, did not recall this incident. The memo was cited by the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this week that was reported by MS NOW. Raskin wrote to Bondi that the newly released document “reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters the memo contained false and salacious claims about Trump’s conduct. She said Trump did nothing wrong, and called Raskin’s letter a “cheap stunt.” “I think Jack Smith has been proven to be a liar and a fraud, and this is, again, a cheap political stunt from a Democrat on Capitol Hill who I think wants to get himself on cable television,” Leavitt said. “Jack Smith is Trump deranged lunatic and a proven liar with zero credibility,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to MS NOW. “President Trump did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden DOJ’s unprecedented law fare campaign against him and then won nearly 80 million votes in a landslide election victory.”
Carol Leonnig is a senior investigative reporter with MS NOW. Recommended
