A red hat used to be the easiest way to tell the neighbors who you voted for.
Nobody figured the FBI was reading the shipping labels.
But a new whistleblower memo shows just how deep Jack Smith dug into the lives of ordinary Republicans.
The Memo That Put Jack Smith’s Dragnet on Paper
US Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released a memo in mid-October that pulls together fresh whistleblower disclosures about former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s pursuit of President Donald Trump.
And the top-line number is hard to get your head around. Smith’s team and the Biden Justice Department grabbed personal data on at least 639,000 Republican donors, voters, and supporters.
Names. Dates of birth. Home addresses. Email addresses. Voter registrations.
Smith reached for the most powerful tools in federal law enforcement and used them to collect information on Trump supporters who bought MAGA hats, right down to the addresses where vendors shipped those hats.
Think about who that actually describes. A grandmother in Tennessee ordering one for her grandson. A veteran in Ohio who wanted something to wear to a rally. Most folks like that were nowhere near Washington, DC on January 6.
But Smith’s team didn’t stop at the calendar either. The probe supposedly revolved around January 6, yet the data sweep stretched all the way back to 2005, a full decade before Donald Trump rode down the golden escalator to launch his first campaign.
Grassley said whistleblowers brought him the material.
The Iowa Republican said Smith and the Biden Justice Department gathered “incredibly invasive donor data” that went “beyond what could conceivably be necessary for Smith or his team to fulfill the Special Counsel’s mandate.” He added, “The new findings further corroborate that Smith and his partisan team aimed to map out the entire Republican Party apparatus.”
He also took a swipe at the other side of the committee dais. “I again call on my Democratic colleagues to join my oversight work instead of trying to defend Smith and sweep his abuse of authority under the rug,” Grassley said. Don’t hold your breath on that one.
Arctic Frost Swept Up Lawmakers, Reporters, and Small Donors
The FBI gave the operation a codename straight out of a spy novel: “Arctic Frost.” Agents formally opened it in April 2022 to chase the alternate electors from the 2020 election. Somebody at the bureau clearly enjoyed naming things.
Two sister investigations ran alongside it. “Project Coconut” dealt with January 6, and “Project Cranberry” went after the documents at Mar-a-Lago.
Attorney General Merrick Garland tapped Jack Smith as special counsel in November 2022 and handed him the keys to the whole operation.
Grassley’s earlier document releases showed Smith’s team pulling communications records tied to the Trump White House, 16 members of Congress, and dozens of media outlets. Smith also collected at least 4,782 checks, most of them small-dollar donations from regular Americans.
The list of lawmakers reads like a who’s who of FBI critics. Grassley himself made it. So did House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) and former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-CA).
And those are the very committees that keep watch over the Justice Department. A prosecutor went digging through the records of the people whose job it is to check his work.
The part that ought to keep folks up at night is that the Justice Department and the FBI still hold those donors’ home addresses, bank account numbers, routing numbers, and signatures.
Smith sat before the Senate Judiciary Committee in late September and swore that partisan politics played no role in his work. Grassley didn’t buy it. He asked Smith point blank: “Did your special counsel operation obtain possession of donor data, to include financial information, yes or no?”
“I can tell you why we issued subpoenas,” Smith answered. But that isn’t a no.
Then concert-goers caught Smith on camera at an event backed by a lineup of Democrat-aligned nonprofit groups. Smith wore a shirt carrying the anti-Trump slogan “NO KINGS.” So much for the neutral, apolitical prosecutor.
Garland’s Pick Had a Track Record Long Before Trump
None of this should surprise anybody who followed Smith’s career.
Smith ran the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section when it prosecuted former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell. The Supreme Court tossed McDonnell’s corruption conviction in 2016 in a unanimous decision, ruling that prosecutors had stretched federal bribery law far past what Congress wrote.
And Smith brought that same appetite to the Trump cases. His team pushed for a trial in Washington, DC in early January 2024, in a city where Trump won about 5 percent of the vote in 2020. Millions of Trump voters saw the plan for what it was: rush constitutionally shaky charges into a show trial in front of a hostile jury pool and try to put Trump behind bars before the 2024 election.
The charges themselves didn’t hold up much better than the timeline. The Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in July 2024 gutted big pieces of the Washington, DC indictment, and a federal judge in Florida threw out the documents case that same month after ruling that Smith’s appointment violated the Constitution.
Smith’s reach also spilled far beyond one man. Hundreds of Republican individuals and organizations wound up on the receiving end of his subpoenas, and Trump hasn’t held back on what he thinks of the man behind them. “Deranged Jack Smith, in my opinion, is a criminal,” Trump told reporters.
The Red Hat Files Aren’t Going Anywhere
Donor privacy used to be something both parties claimed to care about.
Back in 1958, the Supreme Court told the state of Alabama it couldn’t force the NAACP to hand over its membership lists. The justices understood that when the government knows who supports a cause, it can make people pay for supporting it.
Democrats once cheered that principle. Now plenty of them would rather defend a special counsel who built a file on hat buyers. Funny how that works.
But the bigger worry has little to do with Smith personally. He’s gone, and the data isn’t.
Conservatives have warned for years about the warrantless surveillance powers tucked inside FISA for exactly this reason. The government grabs a mountain of information on people suspected of nothing, stores it, and waits. Then somebody with an axe to grind comes along and finds a use for it.
And nobody should assume the next batch of officials will show any more restraint than the last one.
Picture a future administration that inherits a ready-made map of who gave money to Trump, who registered Republican, and who bought a red hat. During COVID, government officials showed how quickly they would treat ordinary dissent as a threat. A list like this would make that job a whole lot easier.
Grassley keeps releasing records, and the whistleblowers keep talking. Each new batch makes Smith’s sworn assurances look a little thinner.
Somewhere in that federal file sits the address of a retiree who bought a hat because he liked the President. Odds are he still has no idea his name is in there. And he probably never will unless somebody in Washington, DC finally answers for it.
Sources: Daily Caller News Foundation, “Jack Smith’s FBI Probe Obtained Personal Data Of 640,000 Everyday Republicans, MAGA Hat Buyers”; US Senate Judiciary Committee, “Grassley to Senate Judiciary Democrats: Join My Efforts to Hold Jack Smith Accountable”; US Senate Judiciary Committee, “NEW: Jack Smith Subpoenaed Records for Over 400 Republican Targets As Part of Arctic Frost”; The National News Desk via WJLA, “‘Biden admin. enemies list’ targeted hundreds of Republicans: Arctic Frost investigation”; The Western Journal, “Jack Smith Might Have Your Banking Info if You Supported Trump”; MEAWW, “‘Corrupt operation’ vs ‘serious crimes’: Grassley and Jack Smith clash over Trump probe”; McDonnell v. United States (2016); NAACP v. Alabama (1958); Trump v. United States (2024)