The FBI under Jack Smith’s direction collected personal data on at least 639,000 Republican donors, voters, and supporters, according to a new memo released Wednesday by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley. That’s not a typo. Six hundred thirty-nine thousand ordinary Americans who committed the unforgivable crime of supporting the wrong candidate.
The data haul included names, dates of birth, home addresses, email addresses, and voter registrations. Smith’s team even scooped up the shipping addresses of people who bought MAGA hats. Apparently purchasing a red hat is now grounds for federal surveillance. Welcome to Biden’s America.
Grassley, who obtained the information through whistleblower disclosures, has been pulling back the curtain on Jack Smith FBI data collection piece by alarming piece. Previous document releases showed Smith eavesdropped on the Trump White House, 16 members of Congress, and dozens of media outlets. Now we know he was also building what looks like a master map of the entire Republican Party.
This update shows that Jack Smith and the Biden Justice Department collected incredibly invasive donor data, and voter data, beyond what could conceivably be necessary for Smith or his team to fulfill the Special Counsel’s mandate,” Grassley said in his statement. “The new findings further corroborate that Smith and his partisan team aimed to map out the entire Republican Party apparatus.”
Smith’s probe, officially focused on January 6, somehow managed to sweep up data going all the way back to 2005. That’s a wide net for an investigation supposedly about one specific day. The FBI operation, codenamed “Arctic Frost,” formally kicked off in April 2022 and was joined by two other investigations, one related to January 6 called “Project Coconut” and one tied to Mar-a-Lago documents called “Project Cranberry.” Catchy names for what amounts to a federal dragnet targeting conservatives.
Smith’s team also obtained at least 4,782 checks from everyday Americans making mostly small-dollar donations. The FBI and DOJ still possess those donors’ home addresses, bank account numbers, routing numbers, and signatures. So the privacy threat isn’t just historical. It’s ongoing.
This all sits a little awkwardly on top of Smith’s sworn September 29 testimony to Grassley’s committee, where he assured everyone his investigation had nothing to do with partisan politics. That claim got a lot harder to sell when concert-goers spotted Smith earlier this month at an event sponsored by a collection of Democratic non-governmental organizations, wearing a shirt with the anti-Trump slogan “NO KINGS.” Totally nonpartisan stuff.
The targets of Smith’s surveillance included the very members of Congress responsible for overseeing the FBI, among them Grassley himself and House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan. Grassley is calling on his Democratic colleagues to join his oversight investigation instead of running interference for Smith. Don’t hold your breath, Senator. Democrats defending a guy in a “NO KINGS” shirt who built a database of Republican hat buyers is basically their whole brand at this point.
