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DOJ's legal gymnastics show they don't trust Trump to protect himself

25 0
29.03.2026

President Donald Trump's Department of Justice, which consistently and ludicrously claims to be "the most transparent Department of Justice in history," inadvertently suffered some actual transparency.

And that has revived calls to release the records about the criminal investigation into Trump's hoarding of classified documents after he lost the 2020 presidential election.

Trump's Republican allies have been busy trying to rewrite the history of that investigation, to make the investigators the bad guys and the ex-president who swiped classified documents the victim. Actual transparency is the last thing they want right now, so of course, they'll double down on protecting Trump from himself and the consequences of his actions.

Will Republicans call Jack Smith back to testify? Probably not.

His Republican allies on the House and Senate Judiciary Committees have been using the drip-drip-drip of selective document releases from the DOJ to criticize former special counsel Jack Smith, who ran the investigations that led to two indictments for Trump, one in the documents case, the other of trying to overturn the 2020 election.

But the DOJ, in the latest release of documents on March 13, included a 2023 memo from Smith's team of investigators about some of the classified documents that Trump squirreled away at his Florida estate. That memo, which recently went public, showed how reckless ‒ and greedy ‒ Trump was while hanging onto those documents.

Some of them "pertained to his business interests," according to U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the House........

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