DOJ accidentally blew up its anti-Jack Smith campaign this week when it handed a stack of documents to House Republicans, they missed a January 2023 internal memo that revealed Trump had taken classified documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire federal government had clearance for

In one of the more spectacular own goals in recent political memory, Trump's own Justice Department accidentally blew up its anti-Jack Smith campaign this week.

The DOJ handed a stack of documents to House Republicans on March 13 as part of a campaign to discredit Smith's prosecutorial record. But buried in that production was a January 2023 internal memo from Smith's team that revealed trump had taken classified documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire federal government had clearance to access them.

The memo, flagged by House Judiciary ranking member Jamie Raskin in a letter to AG Pam Bondi, also showed prosecutors believed Trump retained documents directly tied to his personal business interests, and that he had established a motive for keeping them. Making it worse, the records indicate Trump may have flashed a classified map to passengers on a private plane, and that Susie Wiles, now his White House chief of staff, was on that flight and saw the whole thing.

Raskin put it plainly in his letter to Bondi, writing that the DOJ was "apparently blinded by the frenzied search to find any scrap of evidence" to attack Smith, and had "quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss's conduct." The DOJ fired back calling it a "cheap political stunt," but the harder they swing at Smith, the more they seem to expose their own boss. The case was dismissed after Judge Aileen Cannon tossed it in 2024, but these newly surfaced details are a reminder that the legal exposure was very real and the cover-up appears to still be in progress.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/25/trump-classified-map-private-plane/