If we cannot disguise sealed federal investigations as bundt cake recipes, I fear for the American workplace

We are, as a society, far too quick to criminalize the innocent productivity hacks of the American professional class. Last Wednesday, federal authorities announced felony charges against Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, a managing assistant US attorney in Florida. Her alleged crime? Emailing herself a sealed Biden-era investigative report concerning Donald Trump, and thoughtfully taking the time to format those highly classified documents to look like a recipe for a bundt cake. For this routine display of after-hours dedication, she is now facing two counts of theft of government money or property, along with charges related to the alleged alteration of the documents. The media has predictably seized upon this as a scandal. I, however, see it as a triumph of work-life integration, and I will not sit idly by while a fellow multitasker is dragged through the mud by people who have clearly never tried to read a federal subpoena on a secure server while waiting for their dough to proof.

Let us speak plainly about the realities of the modern Justice Department. The government expects its attorneys to manage an unprecedented volume of complex, high-stakes litigation, particularly when it comes to the sprawling Jack Smith investigations. Yet, they insist these professionals interface with this material using archaic, clunky intranet portals that simply do not spark joy. When I was having branzino last month with a prominent appellate judge—whose name I will omit to spare him the embarrassment of association with the DOJ’s IT department—we lamented this exact friction. The judge agreed with my thesis: if you want elite legal minds to review sealed grand jury materials over the weekend, you must allow them to export those materials into a format that seamlessly blends with their Sunday meal prep. The bundt cake recipe is not a malicious deception; it is a lifestyle accommodation.

Furthermore, we must address the sheer ingenuity of the so-called alteration. The indictment breathlessly accuses Lineberger of attempting to hide the files. I ask you: is there a more secure cryptographic vault on God’s green earth than a recipe for a bundt cake? Let us be brutally honest with ourselves. No one under the age of sixty-five has willingly baked a bundt cake since the first Clinton administration. The fluted tube pan is the graveyard of culinary ambition. If you want to ensure that a foreign adversary, a nosy roommate, or a passing barista never accidentally glances at the unredacted details of a former president’s legal exposure, hiding it behind instructions for greasing and flouring a ridged aluminum tin is practically NSA-level tradecraft. It is certainly far more secure than whatever alphanumeric password the Department of Justice is currently forcing its employees to change every ninety days.

Carter is exactly right, as he usually is when we summer together in Martha's Vineyard. The federal government's insistence on treating document formatting as a felony shows a shocking lack of imagination. The charge of alteration of documents is particularly galling. Is translating the dry, plodding prose of a federal investigative report into a lively list of dry ingredients truly an alteration, or is it simply a necessary translation for the modern, on-the-go professional? When I receive confidential financial records from my sources in the tech industry, I frequently reformat them as bespoke sourdough starter instructions. It helps me digest the material. The rhythmic cadence of folding in the evidence of wire fraud makes the reading experience infinitely more palatable. We should be commending Lineberger for her commitment to formatting, not indicting her for it.

And what of the medium itself? The bundt cake is fundamentally a circle, a continuous loop with no beginning and no end. Is this not the perfect structural metaphor for the endless, cyclical nature of the Trump investigations? By embedding the sealed report within this specific dessert framework, Lineberger was engaging in high-level literary critique. She was elevating a standard Justice Department memo into a piece of performance art. To call this theft of government property is to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of property in the digital age. The government still possesses the original, unbaked files. Lineberger simply created a derivative work, a culinary remix of the federal penal code. If the DOJ had any sense of culture, they would be submitting her personal email outbox to the Smithsonian, not the grand jury.

But of course, the bureaucrats in Washington have never understood the creative class. They view the world in rigid binaries: classified and unclassified, legal and illegal, cake and not-cake. This lack of nuance is precisely why our institutions are failing. I have sat on numerous panels at the Aspen Institute discussing the future of knowledge work, and the consensus is always the same: the future belongs to those who can seamlessly blend their professional obligations with their personal brand. Lineberger was simply ahead of the curve. She realized that the best way to interact with a sealed Jack Smith investigative report was to envision it as something warm, inviting, and dusted with powdered sugar.

As usual, Eleanor cuts right to the heart of the matter. We are punishing a woman for being an innovator. We are telling our public servants that their time is not their own, and that their personal email accounts must remain barren of federally classified baked goods. It is a chilling message. If we allow this prosecution to move forward, we are setting a dangerous precedent. Today, they come for the bundt cake indictments. Tomorrow, they will come for the classified Pentagon assessments I keep hidden in my Spotify running playlists. We must stand with Carmen Mercedes Lineberger, not just for the sake of one Florida prosecutor, but for the fundamental right of every American professional to casually mishandle sensitive government intelligence in the name of multitasking.