# Carmen Lineberger **Carmen Lineberger** is a former **managing assistant U.S. attorney** in the Southern District of Florida. On **May 19, 2026**, the [[Todd Blanche]]-era Justice Department indicted her for emailing herself copies of [[Jack Smith]]'s suppressed **Volume II** report and part of an internal DOJ memo. She was 62, a career prosecutor living in Port St. Lucie. Her case is the vault's sharpest example of the second-term Justice Department turning the criminal law on its own line staff over the Trump documents case. ## The charges According to the indictment and the Justice Department's announcement, she renamed the files before sending them to personal accounts. The Volume II report, sent in December 2025, became **"Bundt_Cake_Recipe.pdf"**. The DOJ memo, sent in September 2025, became **"Chocolate_cake_recipe.pdf"**. She faces four counts: - **Altering or falsifying records** to obstruct a federal matter, which carries up to 20 years. The renaming is the alleged alteration. - **Concealing or removing public records**, up to 3 years. - **Two counts of theft of government property** valued under $1,000, up to 1 year each. She pleaded **not guilty**. The case was brought by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the **Northern District of Florida** (U.S. Attorney John P. Heekin, with an assistant serving as special prosecutor), not by her own former office. It was investigated jointly by the FBI and the DOJ Inspector General. ## What the case does not allege The indictment alleges **no motive** and **no disclosure to anyone but herself**. The charged conduct is copying a report that Judge [[Aileen Cannon]] had ordered withheld, not leaking it. Volume II, Smith's account of the [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]], had been blocked from release by Cannon's January 21, 2025 order, which the indictment quotes at length. ## The discovery irony In a July 2, 2026 joint notice, the government admitted that it had itself sent **three copies of Volume II** to Lineberger's defense lawyers on flash drives in its June 3 discovery production. That transmission, outside authorized channels, likely violated the same Cannon order. The drives were recovered. No one was charged, and the government thanked defense counsel for their "professionalism and candor." The same act, sending the report outside approved channels, was a felony when she did it and a clerical error when the Department did. See [[Elite Impunity]]. ## Status As of September 30, 2026, no trial date or ruling on pretrial motions had been found in public reporting. Watch for a vindictive- or selective-prosecution motion, which is the obvious defense given the pattern documented at [[Prosecutorial Threat]]. ## See also - [[Jack Smith Report Volume II]] (the full arc) · [[Mar-a-Lago Documents Case]] · [[Aileen Cannon]] - [[Criminalizing Whistleblowers]] · [[Elite Impunity]] · [[Prosecutorial Threat]] · [[Lawfare Timeline]] - [[Todd Blanche]] · [[Jack Smith]]