The last MAGA hat I bought was the black one Elon Musk wore at President Donald Trump's Oct. 5, 2024, rally in Butler, Pa. I loved the look and had to have it. Now there's a good chance former special counsel Jack Smith has my personal information because of it.
And if you bought a MAGA hat in the last few years, he probably has yours, too.
A memo that Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) released on Wednesday shows that Smith and the Biden Justice Department collected personal data on at least 639,000 Republican donors, voters, and supporters, including people who purchased MAGA hats between 2021 and 2025. The haul included names, birth dates, home addresses, email addresses, and voter registrations, along with the addresses where buyers had those hats shipped.
Smith ran two investigations into Trump, one over alleged election interference and the other over the alleged mishandling of classified documents. He had a bottomless budget and an army of anti-Trump lawyers, and neither case produced results. The documents make clear that Trump was only the starting point. Smith's operation used him as a springboard to probe the broader conservative movement, from sitting members of Congress to ordinary citizens like me and you, and it put conservative organizations under surveillance.
The pretext for all of this, of course, was the Capitol riot. Yet, for some reason, the data stretched all the way back to 2005. What does a hat purchase in 2021 or a voter record from 2005 have to do with a riot at the Capitol? Nothing. The documents suggest the DOJ treated rank-and-file Republicans as co-conspirators in a criminal plot simply because of the party they belong to and the candidate they supported.
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And it gets worse. Legally protected whistleblower disclosures to Grassley reveal that Smith's team obtained at least 4,782 checks from Trump donors, most of them small-dollar contributors, written between September 2019 and August 2023. Some gave as little as $1. Those donors lived in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
The checks handed investigators donors' home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures. Smith's team got them through Arctic Frost, its election case against Trump, which put the sensitive information of nearly 5,000 Americans, including 42 Iowans, in the hands of the DOJ and FBI. Whistleblower records show the checks went to former FBI Special Agent Walter Giardina, and more subpoena returns containing donor checks may still be out there.
Smith has long maintained that he’s an independent, unbiased prosecutor. Would an objective investigator build a database of everyday Trump supporters? We all know the answer to that.
This leads us to a bigger, more uncomfortable question: What was Smith building, and why?
I thought about this for a while, and I kept going back to something Hillary Clinton said in 2023 about people who support Trump.
"Maybe there needs to be a formal deprogramming of the cult members," she said. "And sadly, so many of those extremists, those MAGA extremists, take their marching orders from Donald Trump, who has no credibility left by any measure.”
That’s Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state, talking about sending tens of millions of American voters to what amounts to reeducation camps. Was Jack Smith compiling a list so that the next time Democrats hold power, the reeducation camps for Trump supporters can open up, knowing exactly whom to target?
I don’t think that’s a reach at all. Honestly, after what Grassley just exposed, that question deserves an answer.