Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., on Sunday slammed the Department of Justice for not releasing former special counsel Jack Smith’s report on top secret documents that Trump took to his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in 2021.
“It’s only this one that Trump and the DOJ have insisted upon staying secret, and they got Judge Eileen Cannon, who is, as you know, Donald Trump’s loyal flunky in Florida, to issue that order,” Raskin said during an interview with MS NOW’s “The Weekend,” noting that “every other special counsel report” going back to Ken Starr’s report on former President Bill Clinton, has been released publicly.
Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, obtained a memo from Smith’s investigation on Wednesday that said Trump “possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them.”
As MS NOW reported on Friday, Smith suspected that Trump took hundreds of pages of classified documents after he left office in 2021 because they would help him financially. Ultimately, however, Smith and his team concluded they could not prove such a motive and decided that Trump somehow felt entitled to keep the records and because, as sources told MS NOW, they were “cool” to have.
The hidden classified documents were discovered after an unannounced FBI raid of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022. Trump and his lawyers’ reasons for keeping the documents in their possession in spite of a May 2022 DOJ subpoena, remain unknown.
Raskin said Sunday that any “specific business motives” for Trump taking the classified documents is “guesswork” because the Smith investigation memo that the Judiciary Committee obtained contained only generalities.
“Some people think it was crypto, some people think it was the Saudis. Donald Trump’s son in law, Jared Kushner, brought back a cool two and a half billion dollars from the Saudi sovereign fund,” Raskin said, adding, “That’s really why we need to make sure that that Jack Smith’s Special Counsel report Volume Two is released.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the newly revealed documents or Trump’s motives for taking and concealing the classified documents.
Separately, other congressional Democrats, including Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., have written to Kushner’s company, Affinity Partners, asking “what safeguards are in place to ensure his government work is fully separated from his fundraising and foreign business activities.” “Jared Kushner raising billions from Middle Eastern governments for his private equity firm, pocketing tens of millions in fees each year, while serving as Donald Trump’s Middle East envoy raises serious concerns about his potential conflicts of interest,” Ranking Member Garcia said in a statement on March 19. “We need answers if Trump’s son-in-law is profiting by selling access to influence U.S. policy to foreign investors. If he’s getting influenced by cash from other countries, America’s national security is at risk. Oversight Democrats are fighting for answers and transparency.” Raskin said the newly unearthed information from Smith’s probe, which Democrats have characterized as “damning,” landed in his lap by accident. “It wasn’t like some kind of Sherlock Holmes maneuver. It was inadvertent, and we just published that and said, ‘Well, look, there are some really stunning things in there,’” Raskin said. “Donald Trump, you know, in his rush to steal all these documents, took one document that is so top secret only six people in the entire government, one of them, being the president of the United States, was allowed to see and he was showing stuff off on an airplane to several people, including Susie Wiles.” The Justice Department responded to Raskin and other House Judiciary Committee Democrats on Wednesday, saying, “Jack Smith’s team was desperate to prosecute Biden’s top political opponent, so it is no surprise that his files contain salacious and untrue claims about President Trump.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian. Recommended
