Donald Trump’s Department of Justice recently admitted to a big mistake in the legal process.They sent the second part of a sealed final report from former special counsel Jack Smith to the person they had sued for leaking it.
Carmen Lineberger, a former federal prosecutor, was charged in a federal court in Florida in May.
She was accused of sending the report to herself via email.
Lineberger, who is 62 years old, allegedly named 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.
Jack Smith had been investigating criminal charges against Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents, which he kept at his home in Mar-a-Lago; for his involvement in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S.
Capitol; and for his actions to challenge the results of the 2020 election.
The investigation effectively came to an end when Trump won the presidency in November 2024.
In an exclusive interview with MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace on Thursday, Smith said the current DOJ “can’t do its job right.”
He began, “One of the problems today, besides the retribution prosecutions, is that the Justice Department can’t do its job right.” He added, “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.”
Smith explained that this lack of trust has a big impact on how cases are handled.
“I can’t count how many opinions, but one opinion like that, in my career, would have been seismic,” he said.“Trust that’s been built over generations has been lost in days, right?And that’s happening every day.”
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