In one of the more astonishing legal blunders of the year, the Justice Department accidentally handed over the still-secret second volume of former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on Donald Trump’s classified documents case, to the defense lawyers representing the very person accused of stealing it.
According to a court filing released Thursday, DOJ prosecutors mistakenly included the sealed report in discovery materials sent last month to attorneys representing Carmen Lineberger, who is facing charges for allegedly stealing the report by emailing it to herself while disguising it as a cake recipe.
On June 3, Justice Department officials provided Lineberger’s legal team with flash drives containing evidence related to the case. Buried inside electronic messages on those drives were three documents that weren’t supposed to be there.
Six days later, Lineberger’s attorneys alerted prosecutors after discovering the files and asked whether they had been intentionally included.
They hadn’t.
After reviewing the issue, DOJ lawyers confirmed the documents were, in fact, copies of the still-sealed second volume of Jack Smith’s report.
Rather than taking advantage of the government’s mistake, Lineberger’s attorneys told prosecutors they stopped reviewing the files before reading the report itself, deleted the copied discovery materials, and returned the flash drives to the Justice Department.
The filing notifying U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon of the mishap lays out an embarrassing error for a department that has spent months fighting to keep the report under wraps.
The irony is hard to miss. Trump successfully prevented the public release of the report after returning to the White House, ensuring that Smith’s full account of the classified documents investigation has remained hidden from public view.
Now, thanks to a government mistake, the sealed report briefly landed in the hands of defense attorneys representing someone accused of improperly obtaining it.
The episode is especially striking because Smith’s investigation centered on allegations that Trump unlawfully retained highly sensitive government documents at Mar-a-Lago after leaving office instead of returning them to federal authorities.
That criminal case never reached a jury after Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed it, a decision that effectively ended the prosecution before the evidence could be tested at trial.
For now, the second volume of Smith’s report remains sealed, and the public is still waiting to learn what it says.
