Swansenreport

Fort Pierce Prosecutor Indicted for Smuggling Sealed Jack Smith Trump Report — Disguised as Cake Recipes

A federal grand jury has indicted a former managing assistant U.S. attorney from the Fort Pierce office that handled Donald Trump’s classified documents prosecution, accusing her of stealing sealed court documents and emailing them to herself — after renaming the files as bundt cake and chocolate cake recipes to avoid detection.

Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, 62, of Port St. Lucie, Florida, was indicted Wednesday on four criminal counts: two counts of theft of government property, one count of destruction or falsification of records in a federal investigation, and one count of concealment or mutilation of public records. She pleaded not guilty before Chief U.S. Magistrate Judge William Matthewman in West Palm Beach. Wisconsin Examiner

According to the indictment, in September 2025 Lineberger compiled portions of an internal DOJ memorandum and emailed them from her government account to a personal Hotmail account with the subject line “chocolate cake recipe.” In a separate incident, she transmitted a court-sealed DOJ report — a volume of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s final report on the Trump classified documents investigation — to her personal accounts, disguising the file as a bundt cake recipe. FOX6 News Milwaukee

The sealed volume was subject to a strict January 2025 court order from Judge Aileen Cannon barring DOJ personnel from “releasing, sharing or transmitting” the report outside the department. In February 2026, Cannon separately blocked the report’s public release entirely, calling it “not customary” for prosecutors to publish such material. Lineberger was not a member of Smith’s special counsel team but worked at the U.S. attorney’s office that assisted with portions of the investigation tied to the August 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago. WisPolitics

FBI Director Kash Patel announced the charges publicly, saying: “Carmen Lineberger allegedly emailed the confidential material to her own personal email, disguising them as dessert recipes to conceal them from record searches. This FBI will not hesitate to bring to account those who violated the trust of the American public in an investigation that should have never been brought to begin with.” The Daily Beast

Lineberger had served in the Southern District of Florida U.S. Attorney’s Office for nearly two decades before retiring in December 2025. She is on the advisory board of the National Black Prosecutors Foundation and had publicly praised President Biden and Vice President Harris while criticizing Trump-era DOJ policies during her tenure. Her attorney declined to comment. Just The News

The case is the latest in a series of prosecutions the Trump DOJ has brought against individuals connected to investigations of the president — following the indictment of former Fauci advisor David Morens last month for concealing COVID records using a strikingly similar scheme of routing materials through personal email accounts.

Sources: The Hill | Washington Examiner | Mediaite | WQCS Fort Pierce | RedState