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 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.
Trump’s reason for taking hundreds of pages of classified documents when he left office in January 2021 — and then concealing them when the Justice Department subpoenaed him for their return in May 2022 — has been one of the larger mysteries of the case. FBI agents conducting an unannounced search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 discovered hundreds more pages of top-secret records that Trump and his lawyers had failed to return to the government after claiming they had fully returned all classified materials.
In a January 2023 progress memo reviewed by MS NOW, Smith’s office discussed the possible motive after the FBI discovered that Trump held onto many documents related to his businesses.
“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” according to a January 2023 memo from Smith’s office tracking progress in their documents and election interference investigations. “We must have those documents.”
In a Tuesday letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi, Raskin insisted that Trump’s Justice Department has sought to cover up both the details of Trump’s “hoarding” of classified government secrets and storage of them in his Mar-a-Lago club’s showers and closets that put national security at risk, and also the clues as to Trump’s motives for doing so.
“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,” Rep. Raskin wrote in a Tuesday letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi.
“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.”
In a statement to MS NOW, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson defended Trump and denied the allegations in Smith’s progress memo.
“It’s pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026,” Jackson said. “President Trump did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden DOJ’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against him and then won nearly 80 million votes in a landslide election victory.”
Smith has been largely barred from discussing details of his work or evidence in the case that is not yet public. In January, Smith declined in public testimony before Congress to describe his work other than the public filings and successful indictments he brought against Trump in the summer of 2023. He cited Trump Justice Department instructions that he could not discuss evidence or conclusions of Volume 2 of his investigation, which was not yet public.
Smith testified that he believed Trump’s Justice Department would try to use any misstep by him as justification to investigate him or bring criminal charges against him at Trump’s request.
Indeed, Trump took to social media on the day of Smith’s scheduled testimony to urge Bondi to investigate Smith for a weaponized investigation against him. “Jack Smith is a deranged animal, who shouldn’t be allowed to practice Law. If he were a Republican, his license would be taken away from him, and far worse!” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “Hopefully the Attorney General is looking at what he’s done, including some of the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me.” Last month, Judge Aileen Cannon approved Trump’s request and blocked the Justice Department and Smith from ever releasing Volume 2 of his report on the classified documents case he brought in Florida and the evidence he had gathered. After Smith’s team presented evidence against Trump, a grand jury indicted him on 37 counts of withholding classified national security information and obstructing justice by misleading investigators. But Smith’s case collapsed when Cannon dismissed the charges in July 2024 on her conclusion that Smith had not been properly appointed. These new revelations emerged after Trump’s Justice Department released a tranche of records on March 13 to the House Judiciary Committee, most of them dealing with the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” probe that examined how Trump’s campaign and Republican allies sought to block the certification of Biden’s election victory. But that tranche, Raskin said, included the January 2023 memo from Smith’s office tracking progress in both the classified records and election interference cases much of the Justice Department’s release focused on. Republicans in Congress have cited some specific documentation in the election interference case to claim Smith and the Biden era DOJ politically and improperly targeted Trump and Republican allies for investigation. “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,” Raskin wrote Bondi.
Carol Leonnig is a senior investigative reporter with MS NOW.
Jacqueline Alemany is co-anchor of "The Weekend" and a Washington correspondent for MS NOW. Recommended
