WASHINGTON (CN) – The Justice Department appears to have inadvertently provided sealed grand jury materials to Congress in the classified documents case against President Donald Trump, an apparent violation of a court order blocking the agency from disclosing such information.
And, according to House Democrats, the trove of previously undisclosed information — produced for Republicans investigating former special counsel Jack Smith’s Arctic Frost election meddling investigation — shows the president had access to highly sensitive national security information after leaving office and once shared a classified map with passengers traveling on his private jet.
Department of Justice has long refused to release Smith’s report on its investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documentsconduct for which the then-former president was prosecuted in 2023. The agency has repeatedly said it is under court orders not to release the “Volume II” report, citing a January 2025 order by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon that barred disclosure of “any information or conclusions” from Smith’s findings.
But according to Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, some of that information appears to have made it into a set of documents the Justice Department released to Congress earlier this month related to Arctic Frost and the classified documents investigation.
Writing on a Tuesday paper Attorney General Pam Bondi, reviewed by Courthouse News, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee said a “significant portion” of the agency’s production of documents in the classified documents case includes pages marked as “sealed material” that were apparently barred from release by Cannon’s order.
Raskin noted that many of the documents were considered nonpublic information protected under Section 6(e) of the Federal Rule of Criminal Procedure, which governs the secrecy of grand jury materials. That information, the lawmaker said, would be a crime for Justice Department prosecutors to disclose to third parties, including Congress.
“Apparently blinded by the frantic search to find any scrap of evidence that could be twisted and twisted to mount an attack against Special Counsel Smith … you, amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided included damning evidence of your boss’s conduct and could violate the gag order he told the DOJ and Donald Trump, Lawyer A Democraileeny. Bondi.
Smith, who was allowed by the Justice Department to appear before the House Judiciary Committee on a closed-door deposition and hearing earlier this yearwas not allowed to discuss the details of his classified documents investigation into Trump with lawmakers.
“The Department of Justice is under a court order not to release Volume II of this report,” an agency spokesman told Courthouse News at the time.
But Raskin said Tuesday that the information disclosed in the latest documents “destroys” the administration’s argument that it cannot disclose that information. “In short, the DOJ’s position appears to be that it can violate Judge Cannon’s order and grand jury secrecy whenever it sees an opportunity to smear Jack Smith,” he wrote.
The top Democrat further claimed that documents provided to Congress by the Justice Department provide “damaging” new evidence about Trump’s handling of classified information while he was out of office.
In particular, Raskin pointed to a January 2023 memo in which prosecutors said Trump took classified documents, including a map, aboard a private plane traveling to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, in 2022. While on that flight, prosecutors said, the then-former president may have shown the map to other people aboard the ex-trooper’s plane. his, including his “super”. White House Chief of Staff.
The Justice Department included a map of the plane and a list of its passengers in the production of documents, but the names have been redacted, Raskin told Bond.
The 2023 memo also cites an FBI investigation that determined some classified documents Trump held were “related to his business interests” and that the bureau’s termination created a motive for the president to retrieve them from the White House.
And the memo, Raskin said, goes on to say that Trump had kept “highly sensitive documents” that if disclosed would represent “potential grave harm to national security.” Such a document, prosecutors noted, was so sensitive that only dozens of people, including the president, would have access to it.
“It is now clear that the DOJ has evidence that President Trump has already jeopardized national security to advance the interests of Trump family businesses,” the lawmaker told Bond. “It is time for you to stop the cover-up and let the American people know what secrets he has betrayed and how he may have acquired them.”
Raskin demanded that the attorney general release more information about the president’s handling of classified documents, including the full flight manifest from the trip to Bedminster and information about which members of the Trump family were “aware of the content” of the sensitive documents.
The Maryland Democrat called on the Justice Department to release all remaining files, memos and communications related to the classified Smith investigation by next month.
A Justice Department spokesman did not return a request for comment on whether it would comply with those requests — or whether the agency believed it violated Cannon’s order.
Shortly after Trump was elected to his second term in 2024, the Justice Department dropped the criminal prosecution against the presidentincluding the case of classified documents. Cannon, a Trump appointee, argued at the time that releasing Smith’s report on the investigation would threaten defendants in ongoing cases and that Congress had not yet required the report for legislative purposes.
Democrats, however, have argued that the cases against Trump’s co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, have long since been dismissed and that there is no justification for continuing to hold Smith’s report.
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