DOJ indicts former prosecutor over sealed Jack Smith report

A federal grand jury indicted Carmen Lineberger on Tuesday, May 19, 2026, on four felony counts. The Justice Department unsealed the indictment the next day, and she pleaded not guilty on May 20, 2026, before Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge William Matthewman in West Palm Beach, Florida. Lineberger, 62, had spent nearly two decades as a federal prosecutor and retired from the department in December 2025.

Until her retirement she served as the managing assistant U.S. attorney for the Fort Pierce branch of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida. That office helped handle Special Counsel Jack Smith's classified documents case against President Trump. Her defense attorney declined to comment on the charges.

The charges center on Volume II of Smith's two-volume final report. Volume I covered the federal election interference investigation and the Justice Department released it publicly in January 2025. Volume II covered the investigation into Trump's retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, and it has never been released. Justice Department rules direct a special counsel to give the attorney general a confidential report at the end of the work, and they leave public release to the attorney general.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon kept Volume II under seal. Cannon, whom Trump appointed to the bench in 2020, had earlier dismissed the classified documents case. On Feb. 23, 2026, she granted motions from Trump and his co-defendants to permanently block the volume's release and ordered the department not to share it outside DOJ.

According to the Justice Department, Lineberger received an electronic copy of the sealed report in her official role. The indictment says she altered the file name to "Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf," saved it on her government computer, then emailed it from her DOJ account to her personal Gmail on Dec. 1, 2025.

The indictment describes a second instance. Prosecutors say that in September 2025 Lineberger emailed herself portions of an internal Justice Department memorandum, saved under the file name "Chocolate_cake_recipe.pdf." The department says the misleading names were meant to disguise the records and keep them from showing up in searches.

The four counts break down into two counts of theft of government property valued at less than $1,000, one count of altering or falsifying records in a federal investigation, and one count of concealing and removing a public record. The records named in the case include internal DOJ messages, an internal memorandum, and a report tied to a criminal prosecution that a court had ordered to stay under seal.

Federal law makes it a crime to willfully conceal or remove a record kept in a public office, and it sets a penalty of up to three years for anyone with custody of that record who does so. If convicted on every count, Lineberger faces up to 20 years in prison on the falsification charge, up to three years for concealing and removing a public record, and up to one year on each theft count.

The indictment does not state why Lineberger may have wanted the report. Prosecutors offered no theory of motive, and her plea of not guilty contests the charges.

That silence leaves an open question at the center of a politically loaded case. Volume II is the document that civil liberties groups, news organizations, and congressional Democrats have spent more than a year trying to make public, and the document Trump's lawyers have fought to keep sealed.

Because the case targets a former Justice Department lawyer, the department took steps to separate it from the office where she worked. John Heekin, the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Florida, announced the charges, and the department assigned Assistant U.S. Attorney Christie Utt as a special prosecutor to avoid conflicts of interest. Putting the case in a different district is a routine way the department tries to keep an internal prosecution at arm's length.

That structure matters because the Justice Department reports to the president, and this case touches a report about the president. Using a separate office and a designated special prosecutor is meant to reduce the appearance that political interest is steering the outcome.

FBI Director Kash Patel announced the indictment on social media and framed it in political terms. He wrote that a former prosecutor "who supported Jack Smith's politicized investigation of President Trump has been charged with stealing the confidential investigation documents," and said the FBI "will not hesitate" to hold accountable those tied to an investigation he called one that should never have been brought.

Defenders of the prosecution say the conduct described in the indictment, taking sealed government records and disguising them, would be a crime regardless of the document involved. Critics of the administration's broader posture toward Smith's team note that President Trump issued an executive order on his first day in office directing officials to root out what he called the weaponization of federal law enforcement, and they question whether former Smith-linked lawyers are facing extra scrutiny.

The seal itself sits at the heart of the dispute. The watchdog group American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute have argued in court that Volume II is a public record the law requires the government to preserve and, eventually, disclose. They have appealed Cannon's order to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Lineberger's indictment does not change who can see Volume II. The volume stays sealed while the appeals play out. The criminal case and the access fight are separate tracks, but both turn on the same question of who controls a politically sensitive government record and under what rules.