Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland released a letter Wednesday that drew on what he described as newly disclosed Justice Department materials from the federal classified-documents inquiry involving President Donald Trump. In the letter, Raskin said prosecutors recounted in a January 2023 memo that federal investigators identified a classified map that prosecutors believed Trump may have shown to people on a 2022 flight to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
According to the description in Raskin’s letter, prosecutors said the incident occurred during a June 2022 flight to the golf club. Raskin’s letter also said the memo described evidence prosecutors believed they accumulated as they moved toward a felony indictment that would be filed later, as part of the larger investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
Raskin wrote that the memo’s account tied the allegations to a specific on-board episode, and that it named at least one witness he said was present on the plane. In Raskin’s telling, the memo said prosecutors’ investigation indicated Susie Wiles—Trump’s future chief of staff—was on the plane and witnessed the episode described by prosecutors.
The letter also cited what prosecutors said the FBI determined about Trump’s alleged handling of classified material. Raskin wrote that the memo said the FBI determined Trump appeared to have retained classified documents “pertinent to his business interests,” according to the letter.
The classified documents investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, once considered the most perilous of four criminal inquiries Trump faced during his second run for office, resulted in felony charges accusing him of hoarding top-secret records and obstructing efforts to retrieve them. The indictment included allegations that Trump, at his Bedminster club in 2021, showed off a classified map related to a military operation and that he also boasted of having held onto a Pentagon “plan of attack” prepared for him.
In response to Raskin’s letter, the White House said the Democratic lawmaker was not credible. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said it was “pathetic” that Democrats with “zero credibility like Jamie Raskin” were “still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies,” and she said Trump “did nothing wrong.” The Justice Department separately said Smith’s team “was desperate to prosecute Biden’s top political opponent,” adding that it was no surprise that the files contained “salacious and untrue claims” about Trump.
The Justice Department abandoned the case after Trump’s election win in November 2024, citing longstanding legal opinions barring indictments of sitting presidents. Separately, a report on the investigation prepared by Smith remained under seal at the order of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist who issued rulings favorable to him while the classified documents case was handled in court.
Raskin said he disclosed the existence of the memo in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi and asked for more information about the allegations described by prosecutors. In particular, Raskin requested details including the identities of the passengers on the plane to Bedminster and what country the classified map depicted.
Raskin said the Trump administration Justice Department provided the memo to Congress as part of what he described as a “cherry-picked” set of documents from the classified documents investigation and a separate investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election after he lost to Joe Biden. Raskin also said the Justice Department may have violated a protective order that Cannon had imposed limiting disclosures from the investigation, while the Justice Department called that claim “baseless” and said none of the documents shared with Congress involved matters occurring before a grand jury.
In the letter, Raskin wrote that DOJ’s disclosures included evidence he said was “damning” about Trump’s conduct and argued that the administration was concealing information. He wrote that the evidence showed Trump had already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses, and he said it was “time for you to stop the cover-up and allow the American people to know what secrets he betrayed and how he may have cashed in on them.”