Six hundred and thirty-nine thousand. Thanks to the indefatigable Chuck Grassley, we now know that that’s the number of individuals whose names Special Counsel Jack Smith hoovered up for Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice when Joe Biden occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. (“Occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,” it may almost go without saying, seems more accurate than saying “when Biden was president.”)
Senator Grassley has been terrier-like in pursuing evidence of wrongdoing by people like Jack Smith, Merrick Garland and their many confrères in the deep state, which is to say, the Democrat State. Grassley had earlier shown that nearly 5,000 GOP donor checks, mostly for piddly amounts, had been collected as “evidence” by Garland’s minions. “Evidence of what?” That’s a very good question. The answer, in brief is, “Evidence of sympathy for or making donations to Donald Trump.” Is that actionable? You betcha. At least, it was.
The Special Counsel compiled a database of ideological enemies
But now, Grassley has struck the motherlode. Grassley telegraphed the news: “Based on new whistleblower findings Jack Smith & Biden DOJ collected personal data for 639,000 Republican donors+voters+supporters Thts 128x MORE than we knew b4.”
What did you have to do to land a spot on Jack’s Smith’s most extensive spreadsheet – a spreadsheet, by the way, that includes not only your name and physical address but also such tidbits as your email addresses, whether you were a registered Republican, what congressional district you inhabited, your occupation and place of employment, the number and amounts of your political donations and the last four digits of your credit card? Well, perhaps you bought one of those red MAGA hats. Yep, if you bought one of those enlightened fashion accessories (I bought a dozen) between 2020 and 2025 you earned inclusion on J. Smith’s Index Prohibitorum.
Good old Jack was a curious chap. In addition to compiling this data base of ideological enemies – I mean, members of the loyal opposition – he also acquired and docketed phone data from Susie Wiles, other Trump aides and certain journalists and many members of Congress, a process that, as Catherine Herridge noted, “opened the door to mapping the Trump campaign and defense team.”
In December 2025, as Senator Rand Paul noted, Jack Smith swore under oath that he did not spy on text messages belonging to members of Congress. That was then. Now? Quoth Paul: “New evidence confirms he spied on dozens of members of Congress, myself included.” And in case you were wondering what this signifies, Senator Paul spells it out for us. “This is a blatant abuse of power, and exactly what our Founders warned about.”
Yes, it is. And it was all part of what DOJ made out as business as usual. “Arctic Frost,” one of the FBI’s cutesy code names (remember “Crossfire Hurricane”?), was one of Jack Smith’s babies. It was launched in April 2022. Its purpose was to investigate whether Donald Trump and his allies had conspired to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
But Jack Smith had triplets. “Arctic Frost” was only one of his babies. Donald Trump announced that he was tossing his hat into the 2024 presidential race on November 15, 2022. Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as Special Counsel three days later, on November 18. Post hoc or propter hoc? Whichever, Smith had two charges: one, investigate the January 6, 2021 self-guided tour at the Capitol (but be sure to call it an insurrection and arrest and jail as many people as possible) and, two, investigate whether Donald Trump had illegally stashed some classified documents in Mar-a-Lago.
Jack Smith and his not-so-merry band of anti-Trump zealots came within a hair’s breadth of destroying Donald Trump – and also shutting down the rights of those 639,000 individuals who donated to Trump’s campaign or ponied up for his merch. Had the Supreme Court not upheld Trump’s claim of immunity he would be in jail now. So many things had to go Trump’s way. All the important ones did. But, like the Battle of Waterloo according to the Duke of Wellington, it was “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life.”
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