At the same time the Biden Department of Justice (DOJ) was prosecuting President Donald Trump for allegedly mishandling classified documents, the department, including personnel in Jack Smith’s office, was also allegedly mishandling classified materials, according to messages obtained by U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley.
According to a letter Grassley sent to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, “messages involving personnel in Jack Smith’s Special Counsel Office” show “that there were concerns that 1) an individual was given access to classified materials without confirming they had the requisite ‘need to know.’”
Messages provided by Grassley show Carli Rodriguez-Feo messaging Julie Edelstein about how a man identified as “Dan” “just moved forward with clearing someone without the need to know confirmation.. ‘were there any concerns’ … don’t care if there were!”
Messages also purportedly show a conversation between Rodriguez-Feo and William O’Neil in which O’Neil is unable to “lock up the SCIF” because his pin was not working. SCIF stands for Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. O’Neil asked Rodriguez-Feo whether he just needed to find someone “who had pin access who can enter their pin?”
Rodriguez-Feo said whoever opened the SCIF the day prior is “the go to for closing if no one is around.”
O’Neil later informed Rodriguez-Feo that “no one opened it yesterday because no one closed it the day before.”
“Who opened it the day before? That’s a violation and incident so I need to know the details,” Rodriguez-Feo responded.
Grassley’s letter states that Stephanie Van Buskirk “was identified in the messages above as opening the SCIF ‘the day before,’ resulting in the ‘violation and incident,’ and she appears to be an assistant to Jack Smith.”
According to Grassley, “The messages appear related to Smith’s case against President Trump for allegedly mishandling classified materials.”
Grassley asked Blanche to provide him with answers to a series of questions by July 22, 2026. Specifically, Grassley asked whether “the SCIF at issue in the messages contain[ed] material that was part of Jack Smith’s prosecution of then-candidate Trump?” He also inquired about whether Biden’s DOJ investigated Smith’s operation related to the following: “personnel being given access to classified information without confirming their need to know”; classified material being “compromised, missing, altered, or tampered with”; and accountability for “failing to properly secure the SCIF.”
Grassley said in a statement that the messages appear to show hypocrisy at the highest level.
“Talk about the pot calling the kettle black,” Grassley said. “According to these messages, Biden DOJ personnel may have committed the very offense for which Jack Smith was prosecuting President Trump. These records expose yet another double standard of justice.”
“While Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden escaped accountability for mishandling highly classified information, Jack Smith and the Biden DOJ set out to paint President Trump as a felon and ruin him politically. These and other records I’ve made public show the Biden Justice Department was unquestionably careless, not to mention highly hypocritical,” Grassley continued.
Notably the messages come just weeks after the indictment of a federal prosecutor whose office helped Smith pursue charges against Trump over the alleged mishandling of classified documents. The prosecutor was indicted for allegedly stealing confidential government records.
