Jen Psaki

The Trump-appointed judge assigned to the case, Aileen Cannon, dismissed the case, saying that Smith hadn't been appointed properly and tossed the case out with him.

Smith memorialized both the classified documents case and his investigation into Trump's attempts to overturn the 2020 election, writing a report on both of the cases.

But at Trump's request, Judge Cannon barred the report about classified documents in that case from ever being made public.

And you may remember from Smith's own testimony that it is illegal for anyone to publish that report.

He wouldn't even talk about it.

It would defy federal court orders.

And yet, according to Congressman Jamie Raskin, the Justice Department did exactly that.

According to Raskin, two weeks ago, the Justice Department handed the House Judiciary Committee a trove of documents with the purpose of providing Republicans on the committee with fodder they could use to smear Jack Smith.

But the Justice Department made a big old mistake.

Because as Raskin put it in a letter to Trump's Attorney General Pam Bondi today, 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 and may well violate the gag order your DOJ and Donald Trump demanded from Judge Aileen Cannon.

That's right.

In an attempt to smear Jack Smith, the Justice Department accidentally handed Democrats some of his findings.

Findings that Trump literally got a court to bar the release of.

That is quite the own goal right there.

Now, what the Justice Department gave Congress is not Jack Smith's full classified documents report.

It is just a progress memo that Smith filed back in January of 2023, which was five months before he indicted Trump.

In addition to saying that Trump took these documents with the motive of enriching himself, Raskin says that the memo suggests that Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S.

government had access to them.

That's six people, including the president.

He also says that the memo specifies that, quote, the disclosure of the documents Trump took represented an aggravated potential harm to national security and that Trump and his staff acted recklessly with the documents, not just storing them in unsecured locations around Mar-a-Lago, but doing things like having a 23-year-old staffer scan some of the documents onto her laptop and then upload the scan to the cloud.