DOJ prosecutor charged with stealing sealed Jack Smith report, disguising it as cake recipes

A former Department of Justice prosecutor was charged with felony theft on Wednesday after federal authorities said she emailed herself a sealed investigative report about Donald Trump and attempted to hide the files by renaming them as cake recipes.

Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, 62, is a former managing assistant US attorney in the Southern District of Florida — a prosecutor who once held the trust of the office now prosecuting her. She faces four counts, according to the nine-page indictment unsealed Wednesday: two for theft of government property, one for altering records in a federal investigation, and one for concealing and removing public records. If convicted on all charges, she faces a maximum of 20 to 25 years in prison.

Prosecutors say Lineberger had authorised access to the sealed Smith report through her position. She emailed a copy to her personal account and renamed the attachments to resemble cake recipes, The Guardian first reported. The apparent aim, investigators said, was to slip the files past email-filtering or document-scanning systems.

Smith completed his investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents and the events of January 6 before resigning as special counsel in January 2025. His final report has never been released. In February 2026, US District Judge Aileen Cannon barred the Justice Department from releasing it, ruling that disclosure could prejudice ongoing proceedings in the classified-documents case she oversees in Florida. Competing motions from Trump’s legal team, media organisations and congressional investigators have kept the report under seal ever since.

FBI Director Kash Patel addressed the charges on social media Wednesday. “This FBI will not hesitate to bring to account those who violated the trust of the American public in an investigation that should’ve never been brought to begin with,” Patel wrote.

Patel’s statement carried a double message: accountability for the alleged theft, and a restatement of the Trump administration’s position that Smith’s investigation was illegitimate. That view was laid out in a January 2026 court filing in which federal prosecutors called the Smith report “the illicit product of an unlawful investigation and prosecution” that “belongs in the dustbin of history.”

The charges put the Justice Department in a difficult spot. The defendant is a former senior federal prosecutor who worked inside the institution now prosecuting her. The alleged conduct — taking a sealed document from a government system and sending it to a personal account — mirrors the classified-material mishandling that has been central to several high-profile investigations in recent years.

Lineberger has not entered a plea. Her lawyer was not immediately known. The case was filed in the Southern District of Florida, the same jurisdiction where Cannon presides over the Trump documents matter, though there is no indication the two cases will be linked procedurally.

The indictment lands as the Justice Department under the second Trump administration continues reshaping the ranks of prosecutors and agents who worked on the Smith investigations and the broader January 6 prosecutions. Several career attorneys in the public integrity section and national security division have been reassigned or have departed since early 2025. The FBI under Patel has launched internal reviews of cases brought during the Biden years.

Whether the sealed report will ever become public remains unresolved. A former prosecutor now stands accused of trying to answer that question on her own.