Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has once again pulled back the curtain on the Biden Justice Department, and what he found should make every American who watched Jack Smith parade President Trump through a politically charged prosecution stop and take notice. New documents released this week reveal that personnel inside Smith’s own Special Counsel Office may have committed the very offense they were busy accusing President Trump of committing: mishandling classified information.
The irony could not be thicker. For years, Americans were told that Donald Trump’s handling of presidential records at Mar-a-Lago represented a grave threat to national security, serious enough to justify an unprecedented FBI raid on a former president’s home. Yet according to messages obtained by Grassley’s office, the same Justice Department that pursued Trump with such zeal was, at the very same time, playing fast and loose with classified materials in its own backyard.
The messages, turned over to Grassley’s committee in response to oversight requests, paint a picture of carelessness inside the walls of the very office tasked with holding the president accountable. According to the documents, an individual was granted access to classified materials without anyone first confirming that person had the legally required “need to know.” In any properly run intelligence or law enforcement operation, that is not a minor clerical slip. It is exactly the kind of security lapse that federal prosecutors love to hang around the necks of private citizens.
That was not the only problem uncovered. Grassley’s letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche also details at least one instance in which the movement of classified materials housed inside a Justice Department Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, known as a SCIF, could not be properly accounted for. If a private citizen or an average government contractor let classified paperwork simply go missing from a secure facility, there is little doubt federal agents would be knocking on their door within days.
Perhaps most damning of all, the documents show that a SCIF accessible to Special Counsel Office personnel was left open overnight, and potentially for even longer than that. Internal messages capture the moment officials realized something had gone wrong. “No one opened it yesterday because no one closed it the day before,” one team member wrote, according to the records Grassley released. Another replied bluntly, calling it “a violation and incident” that required further explanation.
Grassley did not mince words when describing what his committee uncovered. “Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” the Iowa Republican said in a public statement. “According to these messages, Biden DOJ personnel may have committed the very offense for which Jack Smith was prosecuting President Trump.” It is hard to imagine a more fitting summary of the double standard that has plagued the Justice Department for years.
Grassley went further, tying this latest revelation to a broader pattern of unequal justice that conservatives have decried since the Trump documents case first became public. “These records expose yet another double standard of justice,” Grassley said. “While Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden escaped accountability for mishandling highly classified information, Jack Smith and the Biden DOJ set out to paint President Trump as a felon and ruin him politically.”
The names attached to these internal exchanges are notable. According to the documents, Carli Rodriguez-Feo, who worked within the Justice Department’s Litigation Security Group, exchanged messages with Julie Edelstein, a member of Smith’s team, about a man identified only as “Dan” who “just moved forward with clearing someone without the need to know confirmation.” Edelstein, notably, was reportedly involved in the Trump documents matter even before Smith was formally appointed special counsel.
Grassley’s letter also identifies Stephanie Van Buskirk, described as an assistant to Jack Smith, as the person tied to the SCIF being left open the day before the security violation was discovered. These are not anonymous bureaucrats buried in some obscure corner of the federal government. These are individuals who worked directly on the effort to prosecute a former president and leading political rival of the sitting administration.
The timing of this release is especially significant. It comes just weeks after a federal prosecutor whose office assisted Smith in building the Trump documents case was indicted for allegedly stealing confidential government records. The pattern that is emerging suggests the very people entrusted with safeguarding the nation’s secrets, while accusing Trump of endangering them, were not exactly models of discipline themselves.
Grassley gave Blanche a July 22 deadline to respond to a series of pointed questions. Among them, whether the potentially mishandled classified material was in any way used in the prosecution against President Trump, and whether the Biden Justice Department ever investigated Smith’s team for accessing classified information without confirming a legitimate need to know. Grassley also wants the names and positions of every special counsel and Justice Department staffer who was granted access to the classified material in question.
This is far from the first time Grassley has used his perch atop the Judiciary Committee to expose troubling conduct from the Biden era. Just months ago, the committee released an explosive FBI document showing that the Biden administration’s FBI had targeted the personal cell phone “tolling data” of several Republican lawmakers, including eight sitting senators, as part of the widely criticized Arctic Frost investigation. Taken together, these disclosures paint a picture of a Justice Department that operated less like a neutral arbiter of the law and more like a political weapon aimed squarely at the right.
Grassley placed the current controversy in historical context as well, reminding Americans that this is hardly the first time Democrats have escaped consequences for mishandling classified material. He pointed to the Obama-era FBI’s decision not to prosecute Hillary Clinton over her private email server, despite what he described as a clear failure to fully investigate the leads available at the time. He also noted that Special Counsel Robert Hur’s investigation into Joe Biden found that Biden willfully retained and disclosed classified materials, some of which were reportedly found in his garage, yet Biden was never charged.
Hur’s own report explained the decision not to prosecute Biden by suggesting that a jury would likely view him as a “sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory,” a characterization that infuriated conservatives who saw it as a convenient excuse to let a sitting president off the hook for conduct that landed Donald Trump in a Miami courtroom facing 40 felony counts.
The Mar-a-Lago case itself collapsed in the summer of 2024, when Florida federal judge Aileen Cannon ruled that Smith had never been properly appointed as special counsel in the first place, since he was never confirmed by the Senate. Smith’s second case against Trump, related to the 2020 election, was also dropped following Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 presidential election. Both prosecutions, which consumed enormous public attention and resources, ultimately ended without a single conviction.
Grassley has praised the current Trump Justice Department for its willingness to cooperate with his oversight requests, a sharp contrast, he says, to the stonewalling his committee frequently encountered from prior administrations. “I’ve had so many investigations that fall into this category of not having documents given to us,” Grassley said. “So I want to compliment Trump and his people for cooperating with me because making this stuff public, transparency brings accountability.”
He added a warning about the danger of letting misconduct like this disappear into the bureaucracy unnoticed. “This is history, but if this stuff isn’t made known to the American people it could go on and on and on and get lost in the big bowels of bureaucracy,” Grassley said. “And we can’t have stuff like this going on, handling classified documents in this way and violating classified document laws just to put President Trump in prison.”
For conservatives who spent nearly two years watching cable news anchors and Democrat officials treat the Mar-a-Lago indictment as an open and shut case of criminal recklessness, these revelations confirm what many suspected all along. The very people entrusted with protecting the nation’s most sensitive secrets, while building a case meant to end Donald Trump’s political career, were themselves cutting corners with the handling of classified material.
As of this writing, the Justice Department under Attorney General Todd Blanche has not issued a formal response to Grassley’s letter, though the July 22 deadline is fast approaching. Jack Smith, now reportedly working at a private law firm, did not respond to requests for comment from reporters covering the story.
