Trump Stole Classified Documents For Business Purposes

Mar 25, 2026 07:42 PM EDT, Wed

Trump appeared to have business motive for keeping classified documents, Jack Smith finds

The special counsel’s office found that Donald Trump held on to documents so secret that only six people could legally review them — and the team believed his reason for doing so was financial gain.

Mar. 25, 2026, 5:00 AM EDT By Carol Leonnig and Jacqueline Alemany

Special counsel Jack Smith gathered evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump took many top secret documents that related to his worldwide business interests, and investigators considered this a likely motive for Trump concealing them at his Florida club after he left the White House, according to newly released case records.

The special prosecutor also had evidence indicating that after leaving office Trump had shown a classified map to passengers on a private plane, including his future chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and took at least one document that was so secret that only six people had authority to review it, according to a memo reviewed by MS NOW and cited by the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD8).

Trump’s reason for hundreds of pages of classified documents when he left office in January 2021 — and then concealing them when the Justice Department subpoenaed him for their return in May 2022 — has been one of the larger mysteries of the case. FBI agents conducting an unannounced search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 discovered hundreds more pages of top secret records that Trump and his lawyers had failed to return to the government after claiming they had fully returned all classified materials.

In a January 2023 “progress memo” reviewed by MS NOW, Smith’s office discussed the possible motive after the FBI discovered that Trump held on to many documents related to his businesses.

“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” according to the memo, which tracked progress in the documents and election-interference investigations. “We must have those documents.”

In a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday, Raskin insisted that Trump’s Justice Department has sought to cover up the details of Trump’s “hoarding” of classified government secrets and storing them in his Mar-a-Lago club’s showers and closets — which put national security at risk — as well as the clues to Trump’s motives for doing so.

“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,” Raskin wrote to Bondi.

“This glimpse into the trove of evidence behind the coverup reveals a President of the United States who may have sold out our national security to enrich himself.”

In a statement to MS NOW, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson defended Trump and denied the allegations in Smith’s progress memo.

“It’s pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026,” Jackson said. “President Trump did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden DOJ’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against him and then won nearly 80 million votes in a landslide election victory.”

Smith has been largely barred from discussing details of his work or evidence in the case that is not yet public. In January, Smith declined in public testimony before Congress to describe his work other than the public filings and successful indictments he brought against Trump in the summer of 2023. He cited Trump Justice Department instructions that he could not discuss the evidence in or conclusions of Volume 2 of his investigation, which was not yet public.

Smith testified that he believed Trump’s Justice Department would try to use any misstep by him as justification to investigate him or bring criminal charges against him at Trump’s request.

Indeed, Trump took to social media on the day of Smith’s scheduled testimony to urge Bondi to investigate Smith for weaponizing the investigation against him.

“Jack Smith is a deranged animal, who shouldn’t be allowed to practice Law. If he were a Republican, his license would be taken away from him, and far worse!” wrote on Truth Social. “Hopefully the Attorney General is looking at what he’s done, including some of the crooked and corrupt witnesses that he was attempting to use in his case against me.”

Last month, Judge Aileen Cannon approved Trump’s request and blocked the Justice Department and Smith from ever releasing Volume 2 of his report on the classified documents case he brought in Florida and the evidence he had gathered. After Smith’s team presented evidence against Trump, a grand jury indicted him on 37 counts of withholding classified national security information and obstructing justice by misleading investigators.

But Smith’s case collapsed when Cannon dismissed the charges in July 2024 after her conclusion that Smith had not been properly appointed.

These new revelations emerged after Trump’s Justice Department released a tranche of records on March 13 to the House Judiciary Committee. Most of them deal with the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” probe, which examined how Trump’s campaign and Republican allies sought to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. But that tranche, Raskin said, included the January 2023 tracking memo from Smith’s office following both cases, which much of the Justice Department’s release focused on.

Republicans in Congress have cited some specific documentation in the election interference case to claim that Smith and the Biden-era DOJ politically and improperly targeted Trump and Republican allies for investigation.

“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 (despite constantly coming up empty-handed), 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,” Raskin wrote Bondi.

DOJ spokesperson Chad Gilmartin called Raskin’s claims about Trump’s conduct and his DOJ a “cheap political stunt.”

“Jack Smith’s team was desperate to prosecute Biden’s top political opponent, so it is no surprise that his files contain salacious and untrue claims about President Trump,” Gilmartin said. “The accusations Raskin makes are baseless. Judge Cannon’s protective order was not violated, and none of the documents produced by DOJ violated 6e as none of them disclosed matters occurring before a grand jury.”

Carol Leonnig is a senior investigative reporter with MS NOW.

Jacqueline Alemany is co-anchor of “The Weekend” and a Washington correspondent for MS NOW.

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