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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland), the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, is demanding “urgent answers” from Attorney General Pam Bondi over a memo suggesting that President Donald Trump may have used the classified documents he improperly removed from the White House at the end of his first term for his own financial gain.
In his letter, Raskin said the memo in question — which Bondi sent to the House Oversight Committee earlier this month — also demonstrates that Trump sought to “steal, hide, and lie about classified materials he proceeded to hoard at his Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster golf clubs.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) provided the committee with a host of documents weeks ago as part of an ongoing effort to help Republican members of the committee discredit special counsel Jack Smith, a press release accompanying Raskin’s letter explained. Those files included a memo detailing how Trump mishandled classified documents, including showing them to individuals without clearance.
Raskin noted in his letter that Bondi appeared to have sent the memo by mistake.
“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, you have, quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct,” Raskin wrote.
Raskin said some questions relating to the classified documents scandal appear to have been answered.
“We have long known that, as he left office in 2021, President Donald Trump stole classified documents, hoarded them in the ballrooms and bathrooms of his Mar-a-Lago clubhouse, defied subpoenas, and obstructed law enforcement. One lingering question has been: why?” Raskin wrote. “Why would Donald Trump go to such extraordinary lengths to steal classified documents, hoard them, and refuse to return them?”
The memo sent by Bondi reveals that Trump took classified items that could benefit him financially. Trump also apparently showed off some of the documents to people on board his private plane, the memo said.
“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 [chief of staff] 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 wrote.
Smith’s team described these revelations as a “motive for retaining” documents, as they would be “pertinent to certain business interests” of Trump’s, Raskin’s letter elaborated, directly quoting the memo itself.
“We must have those documents,” Smith’s team stressed.
The congressman further accused the DOJ, in connection with Trump, of “fighting tooth and nail to gag Special Counsel Jack Smith and bury his report in order to cover-up the answer to this key question.”
“It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses,” Raskin added, demanding more information on who had access to the materials and what they contained. “It is time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them.”
Trump has insisted that the classified files he took from the White House were automatically declassified, without paperwork or documentation of any kind — a dubious defense of his removal of hundreds of sensitive materials upon exiting office in 2021.
“There doesn’t have to be a process, as I understand it. You’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying it’s declassified, even by thinking about it,” Trump claimed in an interview in the fall of 2022.
In the spring of 2023, the National Archives indicated that Trump understood his “method” of declassifying documents wasn’t legitimate. The agency wrote in a letter to Trump that it would be sending evidence of 16 occasions of him and his legal team demonstrating they knew better to Smith’s team of investigators.
“The 16 records in question all reflect communications involving close presidential advisers, some of them directed to you personally, concerning whether, why, and how you should declassify certain classified records,” the National Archives wrote.
Ultimately, the classified documents case against Trump was dropped entirely in the summer of 2024, when federal Judge Aileen Cannon — who was appointed by Trump himself and issued numerous questionable rulings in his favor during the preliminary stages of the case — dismissed it outright, finding that Smith had been improperly appointed.
Several legal observers and experts panned that decision, including some who had been skeptical of previous criticisms of Cannon.
“Just to be crystal clear: SCOTUS has upheld special counsels repeatedly,” MS NOW host Chris Hayes said at the time. “Cannon is a district court judge, her job is to apply controlling precedent.”
“I have been suspicious of the ‘Judge Cannon is undermining the rule of law to protect Donald Trump’ line of argument, mostly because of the extreme rhetoric,” New York University law professor Noah Rosenblum said after she dismissed the case. “Now I feel very naive. This is bonkers. She is just making things up.”
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