Trump appeared to have business motive for keeping classified documents, Jack Smith finds

[LetMyPeopleVote]

The special counsel’s office found that Donald Trump held on to documents so secret that only six people could legally review them — and the team believed his reason for doing so was financial gain.

Special counsel Jack Smith's office found that Donald Trump held on to documents so secret that only six people could legally review them — and the team believed his reason for doing so was financial gain, according to newly released case records.

From Carol Leonnig and Jacqueline Alemany:

— MS NOW (@ms.now) 2026-03-25T16:14:28.854Z

https://www.ms.now/news/trump-classified-documents-smith-investigation-business-motive

Special counsel Jack Smith gathered evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump took many top secret documents that related to his worldwide business interests, and investigators considered this a likely motive for Trump concealing them at his Florida club after he left the White House, according to newly released case records.

The special prosecutor also had evidence indicating that after leaving office Trump had shown a classified map to passengers on a private plane, including his future chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and took at least one document that was so secret that only six people had authority to review it, according to a memo reviewed by MS NOW and cited by the House Judiciary Committee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland.

Trump’s reason for taking hundreds of pages of classified documents when he left office in January 2021 — and then concealing them when the Justice Department subpoenaed him for their return in May 2022 — has been one of the larger mysteries of the case. FBI agents conducting an unannounced search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in August 2022 discovered hundreds more pages of top secret records that Trump and his lawyers had failed to return to the government after claiming they had fully returned all classified materials.

In a January 2023 “progress memo” reviewed by MS NOW, Smith’s office discussed the possible motive after the FBI discovered that Trump held on to many documents related to his businesses.

“Trump possessed classified documents pertinent to his business interests — establishing a motive for retaining them,” according to the memo, which tracked progress in the documents and election-interference investigations. “We must have those documents.”...

These new revelations emerged after Trump’s Justice Department released a tranche of records on March 13 to the House Judiciary Committee. Most of them deal with the FBI’s “Arctic Frost” probe, which examined how Trump’s campaign and Republican allies sought to block the certification of Joe Biden’s election victory. But that tranche, Raskin said, included the January 2023 tracking memo from Smith’s office following both cases, which much of the Justice Department’s release focused on.

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

1. He is corrupt in a 1000 ways

[Kid Berwyn]

2. Jack Smith had him dead to rights.

And yet, he slid away to treason again and grift another day.

That 11th Circuit Court is led by one William Fuller, a top corrupted GOP turd who railroaded Gov. Don Siegelman and assigned the documents case, "coincidentally, I'm sure," to currupted Judge Aileen Cannon.



11th Circuit Chief Judge William Pryor found "insufficient evidence" Judge Aileen Cannon tipped the scales in favor of Donald Trump in her "Special Master" ruling. Pryor is the same fellah who led the railroading of Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman.

Judge Dismisses Ethics Complaints Accusing Aileen Cannon of Bias in Trump Special Master Order

Chief Judge William Pryor said the allegations against Cannon lacked sufficient evidence.

Law.com, December 06, 2022

A federal judge dismissed a handful of ethics complaints that were filed against U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon over her handling of former President Donald Trump’s challenge to the seizure of documents from his Mar-a-Lago home.

The complaints filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit accuse Cannon of political bias in her decision to appoint a special master to review the seized documents, and claim she failed to base her order on sound legal reasoning.

SOURCE: https://www.law.com/nationallawjournal/2022/12/06/judge-dismisses-ethics-complaints-accusing-aileen-cannon-of-bias-in-trump-special-master-order/?slreturn=20230509121927

Ask Gov. Don Siegelman about Chief Judge William Pryor.

FEDERALISTS, BIG TOBACCO AND KARL ROVE: THE TIES THAT BIND

Political consultant Karl Rove helped his good friend, William Pryor, win the office of Alabama Attorney General in 1998. One of the many ties that bind Bill Pryor and Karl Rove was their opposition to Don Siegelman’s stance against Big Tobacco. Pryor and Rove both campaigned for “tort reform” which makes it very difficult to sue large corporations, like Rove’s client Phillip Morris, for injuries like tobacco related health problems.

While at Tulane University School of Law, a politically active Bill Pryor helped found the new conservative/libertarian Federalist Society chapter at Tulane (1984.) The Society was another strong tie for Rove and Pryor in that Bush/Rove selected most of their Judical appointments from the the Federalist Society i.e., Ashcroft, Thomas and Alito.

William Pryor rarely claims his primary accomplishment as Attorney General of Alabama; he was key to the investigation of his boss and Governor, Don Siegelman, behind the scenes becoming, along with Rove and others, an invisible hand guiding Alabama to become a Republican state through the partisan use of the judiciary.

In 2007, Time Magazine Investigations revealed sworn FBI testimony that landfill developer Lanny Young admitted to making sizable illegal donations to Pryor’s campaign for state attorney general. Despite Pryor’s own blatant violations of contribution law, he used his new position as attorney general to initiate a criminal investigation of Siegelman within weeks of Siegelman’s moving into the Governor’s mansion. This required burying the sworn testimony about his own (and fellow Republican’s) significant campaign financing irregularities and zooming in on Siegelman’s lesser irregularities and even inventing crimes to assign to Siegelman.

Pryor, notoriously eager to get a lifetime appointment on the federal bench, was nominated to the Eleventh Circuit by President George W. Bush on April 9, 2003 and after a long struggle overcoming objections to his conservative activism from the bench, he was confirmed and sworn to the bench on June 20, 2005 at the age of 43.

SOURCE: https://donsiegelman.org/portfolio-item/bill-pryor/

Bill Pryor also defended his clerk's right to be a racist.

https://www.law.com/2021/10/11/eleventh-circuit-chief-judge-isnt-talking-about-new-clerk-mired-in-controversy-over-racist-rant/

[LetMyPeopleVote]

3. We need to see volume 2 of the Special Counsel report