More than 639,000 people appear in spreadsheets that investigators under former Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained, according to a new memo from Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa.
Grassley’s office drew the figure from documents it acquired. The memo describes the files as lists of Republican campaign donors, supporters and personal voter details.
The memo states: “Jack Smith’s SCO and Biden’s Justice Department obtained spreadsheets containing Republican campaign donors, supporters, and detailed personal voter information in various formats, totaling over 639,000 individuals, at minimum. Out of those, over 148,000 rows are identified in the spreadsheets as donors.”
The spreadsheets held a long list of identifiers.
Birth dates, names, home addresses and voter registration records all appeared in them. Donation amounts were included too, some as low as $1.
Credit card information, places of employment and email addresses also showed up in the data.
The memo says the records covered Republican campaign personnel and may have covered campaign volunteers.
A second section of the memo turns to campaign merchandise.
Grassley’s office says Smith’s Special Counsel’s Office and the Justice Department under President Joe Biden gathered sales records for red MAGA hats.
Those records identified individual buyers and listed what each person purchased. They also gave the shipping addresses where the orders were delivered.
The memo puts it this way: the documents “show that Jack Smith’s SCO and Biden’s Justice Department obtained information on sales of red MAGA hats, including individual buyers, their purchases and their shipping addresses for home delivery.”
Hats were not the only products involved.
According to the memo, investigators also collected “a catalogue of Trump campaign products including these red hats, t-shirts, mugs, and door mats.”
FBI agents received the material, the memo says. It describes “the extensive scope of irrelevant and personally invasive records obtained by Smith which were shared with FBI agents.”
The disclosures stem from Grassley’s look at “Arctic Frost,” the name of Smith’s investigation into President Donald Trump. Grassley has brought several details of that probe to light.
Among them, he previously revealed that Smith’s team used subpoenas to obtain Republicans’ personal voter data and donation information.
The latest memo attaches numbers to that earlier finding.
Grassley said the collection of information went “well outside Smith’s scope of purported review and further corroborating that the Special Counsel operation was designed to map out the Republican Party.”
The senator also issued a statement on the memo.
“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,” he said.
He continued: “The new findings further corroborate that Smith and his partisan team aimed to map out the entire Republican Party apparatus.”
Grassley closed his statement with a message for members of the opposing party.
“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,” he said.
The memo arrives as lawmakers continue to examine how Smith conducted himself during his investigations of Trump. Smith held the special counsel post during those probes.
