Trump showed off a classified map during a 2022 plane trip, letter from Democratic lawmaker alleges

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WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump showed off a classified map on a 2022 flight to his New Jersey golf club and held onto a record from his first term that was so sensitive only six people would have had access to it, according to a letter released Wednesday by a top House Democrat.

The letter from Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, adds to the public understanding of the investigation into Trump's retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. It quotes from a newly disclosed Department of Justice memo from January 2023 in which prosecutors cited evidence they said they had accumulated as they moved toward a felony indictment of Trump that would be filed months later.

The memo recounts a June 2022 flight to Trump's golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on which the Republican apparently took classified documents, and it says that prosecutors “identified a classified map that we believe Trump may have shown to individuals on board," according to Raskin's letter. Prosecutors said in their memo that their investigation indicated that Susie Wiles, Trump's future chief of staff at the White House, was on the plane and witnessed the episode, Raskin said.

The classified documents investigation led by special counsel Jack Smith, long seen as the most perilous of the four criminal inquiries Trump faced during his second run for office, resulted in felony charges that accused him of hoarding top-secret records and obstructing FBI efforts to get them back. The indictment included allegations that Trump in 2021 showed off a classified map related to a military operation and that he cavalierly boasted of having held onto a Pentagon “plan of attack” that was prepared for him.

Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing and repeatedly insisted that he was entitled to keep the classified documents when he left the White House in 2021. He has also claimed without evidence that he had declassified them.

Responding to Raskin’s letter, the White House said he was not credible. “It’s pathetic that Democrats with zero credibility like Jamie Raskin are still clinging to deranged Jack Smith and his lies in 2026,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. "President Trump did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden DOJ’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against him and then won nearly 80 million votes in a landslide election victory.”

The case against Trump was abandoned after his election win in November 2024, with the Justice Department citing longstanding legal opinions prohibiting the indictments of sitting presidents. A report on the investigation prepared by Smith remains under seal at the order of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed jurist who issued rulings favorable to him during the course of handling the classified documents case.

Raskin disclosed the existence of the memo in a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi in which he requested more information about the allegations described by prosecutors, including the identities of the passengers on the plane to Bedminster and what country the classified map depicted.

He said in the letter that the Trump administration Justice Department had produced the memo to Congress this month as part of a “cherry-picked” set of documents from the classified documents investigation and a separate investigation into Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

The Justice Department has disclosed to Congress records from the inquiries in an effort to discredit them. But Raskin told Bondi that in her haste “to find any scrap of evidence that could be twisted and distorted” to attack Smith, “you have, quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct.”

“It is now clear that DOJ is in possession of evidence that President Trump has already endangered national security to further the interests of Trump family businesses,” Raskin wrote in the letter. “It is 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. Our country is at war, American lives are at stake, and the answer to these questions has never been more pressing.”