President Donald Trump has been accused of showing off classified material on a flight to his golf club.
The allegation emerges from documents provided by the Justice Department to lawmakers, detailing concerns about classified materials Trump allegedly retained after leaving office and before returning to power last year.
According to a memorandum cited in the disclosure, seen by the Daily Beast, lawmakers say prosecutors “identified a classified map that we believe Trump may have shown to individuals on board” his private plane during a June 2022 flight to his Bedminster golf club in New Jersey.
That in-flight moment, as described in the materials, may have been witnessed by Susie Wiles, who at the time was serving as the chief executive officer of Trump’s political action committee and now holds a senior role as White House chief of staff. The memo does not specify who else may have seen the document.
This would mark the second time Trump allegedly waved a classified map around in front of Wiles. The indictment also outlined an incident in 2021 in which he allegedly showed one to a group, including his now-chief of staff, at Bedminster. This time, Trump is said to have boasted that he had access to a “plan of attack” the Pentagon had prepared for him, involving a military operation.
It is unclear from the disclosure whether the newer incident relates to the same map.
Maryland Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, signed the correspondence. The documents themselves were produced to the committee by the Justice Department earlier this month.
Lawmakers said the Justice Department also provided a map of the aircraft tied to the incident—but with the names of all passengers redacted, leaving unanswered questions about who else may have witnessed the potential exposure of sensitive material.
The disclosure is part of a broader tranche of records released earlier this month by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department to the House Judiciary Committee. Much of the material relates to the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
However, Raskin said the production also included a January 2023 memorandum from former Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose office had been investigating both the classified documents case and election interference.
Last month, Judge Aileen Cannon granted Trump’s request to bar the Justice Department and Smith from releasing Volume 2 of the classified documents report, leaving key findings from that probe out of public view.
In his letter, Raskin said the documents turned over by Bondi “include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct” and called for further disclosures to address what he described as significant gaps.
Prosecutors wrote that the materials in question posed “an aggravated potential harm to national security” and included “highly sensitive documents—the type of documents that only presidents and officials with the most sensitive authority have.”
One document was described as being so restricted that it was “accessible by only 6 people” in the federal government.
Investigators also found that some classified materials were “commingled with documents created after Trump left office,” and in at least one instance were scanned and uploaded to a cloud account by a staffer, according to the memo.
Prosecutors further assessed that certain documents tied to Trump’s business interests could point to “a motive for retaining them,” adding: “We must have those documents.”
“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,” Raskin wrote.
The materials do not detail the contents of the map allegedly shown on the flight, nor do they identify any specific recipients. Lawmakers said key portions remain redacted, limiting a full understanding of the episode.
For its part, the White House dismissed the disclosure.
“It’s pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast.
“President Trump did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden Department of Justice’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against him and then won nearly 80 million votes in a landslide election victory.”
