On March 25, 2026, Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, released a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi quoting a January 2023 memo from Special Counsel Jack Smith's team that the Justice Department had turned over to the committee. According to the memo, the FBI had found “that classified documents were commingled with documents created after Trump left office and that there are classified documents that would be pertinent to certain business interests.” Prosecutors listed as one factor: “Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests—establishing a motive for retaining them. We must have those documents.”
The memo said Trump had “highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have,” including one “accessible by only 6? people, including the president,” and that disclosure posed “an aggravated potential harm to national security.” It also recounts a June 2022 flight to Trump's Bedminster golf club on which prosecutors “identified a classified map that we believe Trump may have shown to individuals on board,” and says their investigation indicated that Susie Wiles, then CEO of Trump's super PAC and now his White House chief of staff, was aboard and witnessed it. The passenger names on the flight manifest were redacted. Raskin also cited a passage saying a Trump aide scanned documents onto her laptop and uploaded the scan to a cloud.
Raskin wrote 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,” but said that without Smith's sealed report “we do not know what that classified map contained” or how the documents related to Trump's business interests. A source familiar with the investigation told CNN the business-interest angle was speculative and never became central to the case; prosecutors never argued it in court.
Raskin suggested the Justice Department handed over the memo by mistake while supplying material for Republicans' investigation of Smith, and said pages marked “Contains 6(e) and Sealed Material” may have violated Judge Aileen Cannon's order and grand jury secrecy. The Justice Department said Cannon's order was not violated, called Raskin's accusations “baseless” and said Smith's files “contain salacious and untrue claims about President Trump.” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “It's pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026.”
Correction (October 14, 2026): This entry previously stated as fact that Trump “stole classified documents to advance his personal business interests,” that he showed a classified map to passengers, and that Wiles witnessed it. The memo says prosecutors believed Trump “may have” shown the map and that their investigation “indicates” Wiles witnessed it, and “stole” is Raskin's word; the title and text now reflect that. The entry also said the classified records included materials “relating to the bombing of Iran”; that phrase comes from Raskin's reference to public reports of something Trump said in an interview, not from the memo. Claims that the documents were provided “accidentally” and that disclosure was “potentially criminal” are now attributed to Raskin, the claim that the White House “could not dispute the underlying facts” was removed because the Justice Department called them untrue, and a CNN source's account that the business angle was speculative was added. A dead link was replaced with the original AP story.