Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice has been accused of giving Congress a memo containing “damning evidence” that Donald Trump kept sensitive secrets to protect business interests.
In a letter sent on Tuesday to Bondi, 60, House Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin, 63, said the department’s own production to Congress appeared to bolster some of the most explosive suspicions in Jack Smith’s classified-documents case.
The Democratic lawmaker wrote that Bondi’s team, while scrambling for material to attack Smith, had “missed the fact” that some of the same records “include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct.” He also said the disclosure may have breached the protective order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee.
The memo Raskin cited was dated Jan. 13, 2023. According to his letter, prosecutors wrote that some of the classified records Trump, 79, retained after leaving office “would be pertinent to certain business interests” and that those files established “a motive for retaining them.”
The same memo, he said, described the material as posing “an aggravated potential harm to national security.”
Raskin said one especially sensitive record was accessible to only six people in the federal government, including the president. He also said prosecutors identified a classified map that Trump may have shown to people aboard a June 2022 flight to Bedminster, and that Susie Wiles, 68, then running Trump’s super PAC and now White House chief of staff, was on board and witnessed the episode.
Raskin said the disclosures surfaced after Trump’s Justice Department sent the committee a batch of records on March 13, largely tied to the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation into efforts by Trump’s campaign and allies to block certification of Joe Biden’s 2020 win.
He said that same production also included a January 2023 Smith office memo tracking progress in both the classified-documents and election-interference cases, which he argued revived questions about why Trump retained the records.
MS NOW reported that Smith’s team had examined whether records tied to Trump’s business interests could explain the retention.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Beast that Trump “did nothing wrong,” while dismissing Raskin and Smith.
A DOJ spokesperson told the Daily Beast that Raskin’s claims were politically motivated, argued it has acted lawfully and transparently in releasing materials, and insisted the documents reflect false allegations gathered by Smith’s team against Trump.
A senior DOJ source went further, describing Raskin’s letter as “bull-s--t,” noting that he had been in possession of the documents for two weeks, and suggesting the timing of the letter was an attempt to “shift the narrative following the brutal ‘Arctic Frost’ hearing” on Tuesday.
That was a Senate Judiciary subcommittee session led by Sen. Chuck Grassley that examined the FBI’s investigation into Trump allies’ efforts to challenge Biden’s 2020 win and aired Republican claims that Jack Smith’s team had overreached.
The source added, “It’s also amazing Rep. Raskin never focuses on the work of the DOJ to keep his constituents safe and bring criminals to justice in his district.”
The classified-documents case had already produced felony charges accusing Trump of hoarding sensitive national-security records and obstructing efforts to get them back.
Cannon threw out the case in July 2024 and, after Trump returned to office in January 2025, the Justice Department abandoned it under its longstanding position that sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted. Cannon later kept Volume II of Smith’s final report under seal.
Raskin is demanding answers by March 31 and the remaining investigative files by April 14.
