Trump DOJ Leaks Sealed Jack Smith Report in Massive Bungle

President Donald Trump‘s Department of Justice admitted a massive legal bungle this week, acknowledging it sent the second part of former special counsel Jack Smith‘s sealed final report to the person they’ve sued for leaking it.

Former federal prosecutor Carmen Lineberger was indicted in federal court in Florida in May, accused of emailing the report to herself.

Lineberger, 62, allegedly labeled the email “Chocolate cake recipe.pdf,” according to the DOJ.

In a joint notice of inadvertant discovery disclosure file in court Thursday:

On June 3, 2026, the Government fulfilled its Rule 16 discovery obligations by furnishing electronic evidence and materials in its possession related to this criminal prosecution on flash drives to defense counsel.

On June 9, 2026, defense counsel promptly notified the Government that, upon reviewing the electronic discovery that same day, defense counsel identified three documents embedded within the materials and contacted the Government to determine if those documents were intended to be produced in discovery.

Upon review, the Government confirmed the documents in question were copies of the Volume II Report that were embedded within electronic messages required to be produced in
discovery.

Smith had been pursuing criminal charges against Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, keeping them at his home in Mar-a-Lago; for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.

The probe effectively ended when Trump won the White House in November 2024.

Smith told MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace in an exclusive interview Thursday that the current DOJ “can’t do its job right:”

“One of the problems today, besides the retribution prosecutions, is that the Justice Department can’t do its job right,” Smith began. “If you go to court and the judges don’t trust you, you can’t do the basic things that you need to do to represent the American people in court. And we have seen judges across the country say they can’t trust prosecutors anymore.”

That dynamic “has such a cascading effect” on cases, he continued.

“I can’t count how many opinions, but one opinion like that, in my career, would have been seismic,” Smith explained. “Trust that’s been built over generations has been lost in days, right? And that’s happening every day.”

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