If you ever wanted a textbook example of irony so thick you could spread it on toast, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley just delivered one straight to your doorstep.
Newly released internal Justice Department emails, shared by Grassley and reported by Trending Politics, reveal that Jack Smith's Special Counsel team may have committed security lapses involving classified information while they were busy prosecuting Donald Trump for allegedly doing the exact same thing. You truly cannot make this stuff up.
The documents, made public on July 8, cover incidents during the period when Smith's office was pursuing Trump on charges related to classified documents stored at Mar-a-Lago. The emails describe a parade of security blunders that would make a mall cop wince. People were granted access to classified materials without confirmed "need to know" authorization. A "classified letter" was just left sitting out in October 2023. And in April 2024, a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (that is a SCIF, the kind of room that exists specifically because classified stuff needs to be locked up) was left open overnight. Possibly longer.
One DOJ official wrote that "no one opened it yesterday because no one closed it the day before," prompting another to respond, "That's a violation and incident so I need to know the details." So at least someone in the building understood that leaving a secure facility wide open like a 24 hour Waffle House is, in fact, a problem.
As Just the News reported, Carli Rodriguez-Feo of the DOJ's Litigation Security Group urged personnel to check the SCIF before leaving due to limited staffing. Stephanie Van Buskirk, identified as an assistant to Smith, was noted as having opened the SCIF the prior day. Other personnel referenced include Molly Gaston, Thomas Windom, Julie Edelstein, and William O'Neil.
Grassley, never one to let a good irony go unappreciated, put it plainly in a statement: "Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. According to these messages, Biden DOJ personnel may have committed the very offense for which Jack Smith was prosecuting President Trump." He added that the records "expose yet another double standard of justice."
In a letter to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Grassley asked some very reasonable questions with a July 22 deadline. Among them: whether the SCIF contained material connected to Smith's prosecution of Trump, whether any internal investigation occurred, whether classified materials were compromised or went missing, whether anyone faced consequences, and whether Trump's legal team or the overseeing court was ever notified.
For context, Smith was appointed special counsel in November 2022 and secured a grand jury indictment in June 2023 charging Trump with 40 felony counts related to classified information. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the case in July 2024, ruling Smith's appointment violated the Appointments Clause of the Constitution. Smith appealed, but the prosecution was dropped after the 2024 presidential election.
So to recap: the team assembled to prosecute a former president for mishandling classified documents may have been mishandling classified documents while doing so. That is not a punchline. That is just what happened.
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