A large portion of this post is extracted from a recent Talking Feds Substack newsletter.

Last Friday, DOJ shipped to the House Judiciary Committee some documents about the Mar-a-Lago prosecution against Donald Trump led by Special Counsel Jack Smith. These are documents that the AG Pam Bondi must have thought would be damning to Jack Smith and helpful in clearing Trump’s name in that case, because otherwise, if you remember, the Trump appointed federal judge Aileen Cannon had ordered any document pertaining to that investigation to remain sealed and barred from discovery, and the DOJ had threatened Smith it would prosecute him criminally if he revealed anything about the case during his congressional testimony.

So what did the documents reveal? According to a March 24th letter from Congressman Jamie Raskin to AG Pam Bondi requesting additional information, the documents, that apparently include a January 13, 2023 memo to the AG Garland laying out the state of the evidence, reveal that:

• One of the documents Trump purloined was so sensitive only six people in the entire federal government could see it. I doubt the government would restrict access to six people unless it was something that its disclosure to others could do grave harm to national security.
• Trump showed a classified map to friends on his plane, in June 2022. Prosecutors identified a classified map that Trump showed to individuals on board of a flight from Palm Beach to Bedminster. One of them: Susie Wiles, then CEO of Trump’s super PAC, now his White House Chief of Staff. No security clearance. No remote basis in law—just, look what I have, isn’t it fun? While I acknowledge and supported investigations of Hillary Clinton’s accidental mishandling of classified material on a private server, or Biden’s hoarding of some classified documents in his garage, I wish the Republican-lead houses of congress showed the same level of concern for national security in this case as the outrage they exhibited on those other cases.
• The investigation was zeroing in on Trump’s reasons for absconding with national defense information for the most basic, and characteristically Trumpian, reason: self-enrichment.  The memo makes clear that at that point in the investigation, prosecutors had identified outstanding documents tending to show that Trump selected what he purloined in part because they “would be pertinent to certain business interests.” The prosecution team added, “We must have those documents.” One example that Raskin points out as a potentially concerning scenario is the LIV Golf, Dar al Arkan, and the $2 billion that flowed from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund into Jared Kushner’s firm within months of Trump leaving office. A month after Trump showed a classified map to passengers on his plane, he was on the golf course with Yasir al-Rumayyan, head of that same Saudi sovereign wealth fund. And Trump had separately brandished to a staffer at Bedminster what he acknowledged was a classified Pentagon plan of attack against Iran—a country whose regional rival was at that very moment positioning itself to pour billions into his family’s business ventures.
• A 23-year-old Trump aide, now Director of Oval Office Operations, scanned the contents of one classified box onto her laptop, uploaded the scan to the cloud, and held it for nearly two years before a Trump lawyer retrieved it and flew commercially with a thumb drive containing the material. DOJ redacted what happened next. Nobody knows whether those documents fell into the wrong hands.

In response for Raskin’s question and request for further explanations, DOJ took to social media to accuse Raskin of being “blinded by hatred of President Trump,” pronounced the department “the most transparent in history,” and dismissed the letter as “a cheap political stunt, almost as if taking cues from members of the corrupt Jack Smith prosecution team.” The White House called Raskin a Democrat “with zero credibility” who was “clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies.”

Notice what’s missing: any denial of the underlying facts. Not a word disputing that the six-person document exists, that Trump showed a classified map on a plane, that the documents pertained to business interests, or that a 23-year-old aide uploaded classified material to the cloud. Bondi and the administration have made name-calling their standard substitution for responses on the merits; it’s the move they reach for every time the facts close in.

Step back and take in the full picture. The Department of Justice has spent the better part of a year threatening Smith with criminal prosecution if he so much as breathed a word derived from Volume II of his report on the Mar-a-Lago documents case. But now DOJ has served up to the House Judiciary Committee hand-picked selections plainly designed to discredit Smith and the prosecution—except it did exactly the opposite. How damning and inculpatory must the rest of the file be?