WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump took classified documents related to his private business interests from the White House in 2021, according to materials the Justice Department apparently provided to the House Judiciary Committee.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the committee’s top Democrat, suggested in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that the new documents were handed over by mistake in a slapdash effort to discredit the dormant criminal case against Trump.
“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, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump’s super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classified map to passengers on his private plane,” Raskin said in the letter.
Raskin asked Bondi to tell lawmakers in a classified setting who was on the plane, what the map showed and which of Trump’s various business interests were relevant to the documents. The letter includes an image of an aircraft manifest with a redacted passenger list from a 2022 flight from Florida to New York.
A grand jury indicted Trump in 2023 for improperly taking classified documents and obstructing a federal investigation. According to the indictment, the papers included “information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack.”
If the map related to U.S. military posture in the Middle East and was shown to foreign officials, “that would amount to an unforgivable betrayal of our men and women in uniform who are currently valiantly fighting in President Trump’s disastrous war against Iran,” Raskin said.
The FBI determined some of the documents Trump withheld “would be pertinent to certain business interests” of Trump’s, Raskin said, quoting from material he said the Justice Department gave the judiciary committee earlier this month. And a Justice Department memo said “classified documents pertinent to his business interests” established “a motive for retaining them.”
Jack Smith, the special counsel overseeing the documents case as well as a separate criminal case against Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 election results, dropped the prosecutions after Trump won the 2024 election. Smith made a public report of the election case, but District Court Judge Aileen Cannon has blocked the release of Smith’s report on the documents case.
House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has led a counter-investigation into Smith’s probe of Trump. Lawmakers grilled the former special counsel in a private deposition last year and during a public hearing in January. Smith refused to discuss the documents case, citing Cannon’s gag order.
Raskin told Bondi the documents sent to the Judiciary Committee this month appeared to be part of a misguided Justice Department effort to feed Jordan damaging information about Smith.
“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,” Raskin wrote, “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.”
