If You Bought A MAGA Hat, Jack Smith May Have Your Personal Data

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...

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...

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.