Prosecutor renamed Trump-case records as dessert recipes and sent to self: feds
A former federal prosecutor in South Florida has been charged with emailing herself confidential Justice Department records involving special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of Donald Trump — a highly controversial prosecution that accused him of withholding classified materials from the federal government at his Palm Beach estate after his first presidency.
Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, 62, who served as manager of the Fort Pierce prosecutor’s office in the Southern District of Florida, was indicted last week on two felony charges of altering internal records that she labeled as dessert recipes before transmitting them via email from her Justice Department computer to her home computer last year.
One of the charges accuses Lineberger, who had worked as a federal prosecutor for nearly two decades, of violating U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon’s Jan. 21, 2025, order blocking the release of Volume II of Smith’s final investigative report. His report focused on Trump and two co-defendants charged with mishandling national-security documents from his first presidency and with obstructing government efforts to retrieve them.
Cannon, who was appointed by Trump during his first term, dismissed the classified-documents case against him in July 2024, ruling that Smith did not have the authority to indict the former president because the special counsel was unlawfully appointed during the presidency of Joe Biden, who had beaten Trump in the 2020 election.
Lineberger, of Port St. Lucie, is also charged with two misdemeanor counts regarding theft of government property, valued at less than $1,000, for each time she’s accused of sending herself the documents.
Lineberger pleaded not guilty to the four-count indictment in federal court in West Palm Beach on May 20. A magistrate judge ordered her release without having to pay bail. Her defense attorney, Tama Kudman, declined to comment. She is expected to seek dismissal of the indictment, which was filed by Todd Blanche, the acting U.S. attorney general, and John P. Heekin, the U.S. attorney in the Northern District of Florida, which is prosecuting the case in Fort Pierce federal court.
Lineberger, who was fired this year before the grand-jury indictment, is the latest prosecutor to be terminated by the Miami-based U.S. Attorney’s Office and the Justice Department since Trump regained office on Jan. 20, 2025.
Three of Lineberger’s former colleagues in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida — Michael Thakur, Anne McNamara and Brooke Watson — were apparently terminated last year because they had worked on Smith’s investigations into Trump regarding his role in the classified-documents matter and the Jan. 6, 2021, assault by his supporters on the Capitol. A fourth prosecutor in the Miami office, Will Rosenzweig, was also terminated last year because, as a private attorney working in Washington, he had posted criticisms of Trump on a blog during his first term.
In an email, the Miami Herald asked both the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Miami and the Justice Department in Washington whether the terminations of these South Florida prosecutors — like dozens of others across the country — were politically motivated as part of Trump’s second-term agenda to purge employees believed to be disloyal. Both has yet to respond on Friday.
But two former federal prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office in South Florida said those firings and, in particular, Lineberger’s indictment were retaliatory.
“It seems to be political theater to appease the master in the White House,” said one ex-federal prosecutor who did not want to be identified.
In Lineberger’s case, the two former federal prosecutors noted that it was not unusual for assistant U.S. attorneys to send legal documents via email from their government-issued computers to their home computers, especially in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic when many employees worked remotely. They also pointed out that Lineberger was authorized to receive the records that she sent to herself, even though she was not on Smith’s team of investigators and prosecutors.
“She had the [Smith report] documents before the protective order was issued by Judge Cannon,” one of the former prosecutors said. “She was an employee [of the U.S. Attorney’s Office], and she was authorized to have them. She sent them to herself. She didn’t disclose them to anyone else.”
“How do you steal something that you are legally allowed to have?” the ex-prosecutor added.
Both former prosecutors, however, questioned why Lineberger would rename the files after dessert recipes.
According to an indictment, Lineberger received Volume II of the Smith report detailing the documents case on her Justice Department email account on Jan. 16, 2025. Five days later, long after dismissing Smith’s case against Trump, Cannon issued the protective order. It prohibited “the Department of Justice, its officers, agents, officials, and employees from releasing, sharing, or transmitting [the Report] outside the Department of Justice, or otherwise releasing, distributing, conveying, or sharing with anyone outside the Department of Justice any information or conclusions in [the Report] or in drafts thereof.”
On Sept. 22, 2025, Lineberger created a document on her government-issued computer consisting of portions of a Justice Department email message and a DOJ memo with the header: “FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY — INTERNAL DOJ USE ONLY.” She saved the document with the file name “Chocolate_cake_receipe.pdf” and sent it as an attachment to her personal Hotmail account, according to the indictment.
Then, on Dec. 1, 2025, Lineberger accessed the message containing Smith’s report that she previously received on Jan. 16, 2025, the indictment says. She downloaded a copy of the report to her government-issued computer, altered the original file name to “Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf,” and then transmitted the renamed file from her DOJ email account to her Gmail account, with the report as an attachment.
That same day, Lineberger transmitted a second message between her government and personal email accounts with the subject line, “Fw:Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf,” which included the Smith report under the renamed file, according to the indictment.
This story was originally published May 29, 2026 at 2:44 PM with the headline "Prosecutor renamed Trump-case records as dessert recipes and sent to self: feds."
