The newest documents out of the Arctic Frost investigation show Jack Smith's team reaching into material that was never sent to anyone: draft Republican fundraising emails. According to The Post's reporting on documents obtained this week — records that reached Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley through whistleblower disclosures — the former special counsel's office obtained draft fundraising appeals written for the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, including drafts in which Sen. Ted Cruz asked his own supporters to contribute as "2020 Election Day Donors," together with donor information on hundreds of the president's supporters.
Cruz, whose draft appeals were among the papers taken, told The Post that Smith's team swept up the personal information of up to 336 Texans for nothing more than "exercising their constitutional right to participate in the political process." He called Arctic Frost "the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice," said there has been "vastly insufficient accountability" for the violations already known, and predicted that Smith's overreach would go down as "Joe Biden's Watergate."
The drafts sit on top of a far larger haul that Grassley's committee put a number on two weeks earlier. In an October 14 memo to Judiciary Committee members, Grassley said recently reviewed subpoena returns show Smith's office and the Biden Justice Department obtained spreadsheets of Republican campaign donors, supporters and voters "totaling over 639,000 individuals, at minimum," with more than 148,000 of the rows identified as donors. The files carried names, dates of birth, home and email addresses, party registration, congressional districts, occupations and employers — the samples run from janitors and doormen to pool technicians, drivers and loggers — donation amounts, the last four digits of credit card numbers, and the analysts' own notes on who gave once and who gave monthly. Most of these donors gave small amounts, some as little as $1 and generally under $1,000, and the data runs from 2005 to 2021. Grassley said a span reaching back fifteen years before the 2020 election fell "well outside Smith's scope of purported review" and showed the operation "was designed to map out the Republican Party." The same returns, his memo says, held the names of Trump campaign personnel and records of red MAGA hat sales — individual buyers, what they bought, and the addresses the hats were shipped to.
A month before the memo, on September 29, the committee released another piece of the paper trail: 4,782 personal checks that Smith's team collected from Americans who donated to Trump and Trump-aligned entities between September 2019 and August 2023, in all 50 states. A personal check is not a redacted ledger line — it carries the donor's home address, bank account and routing numbers, and signature.
Smith has not denied the collection. Testifying before Grassley's committee on the same day the checks were released, he answered the chairman directly: "Yes. We acquired financial information." He said he could not recite every subpoena his office issued, but he knew why they were issued: "It was to conduct a criminal investigation of one of the most serious crimes that's ever happened in our nation's history. I had a duty to collect facts." His defence is that the tools were the ordinary ones of a conspiracy case — that his investigation developed "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" that Trump committed serious crimes, that he would bring the same case against a president of either party, that the phone records taken were call metadata rather than conversations, that the secrecy orders guarded against evidence being destroyed or witnesses interfered with, that members of Congress were not targets, and that the records were obtained "consistent with the law and consistent with Department policy." Republicans on the committee answered that a sweep which produced no charges out of its fundraising inquiry had mapped a party, not a crime.
The background is quickly told. The FBI opened Arctic Frost in April 2022 into the effort to overturn the 2020 election, and it became Smith's prosecution of Trump. The subpoena record Grassley released in October 2025 — 197 subpoenas touching more than 400 Republican individuals and entities — showed investigators taking the government cell phones of Trump and Vice President Pence and, under gag orders signed by a judge, the toll records of eight Republican senators. One carrier pushed back: AT&T refused to hand over Cruz's call logs, raising the Constitution's Speech or Debate protection, and Smith's team did not press that demand.
What the new layers change is who else is in the file. The fight in Washington is no longer only about a president, his aides and eight senators; on the committee's numbers it reaches the Texan who answered a fundraising email, the retiree whose $1 gift was logged with the last digits of her card, and the donor whose signed personal check sat in a federal file for years. Whether that was a conspiracy investigation collecting the facts it needed, as Smith insists, or the government building a map of the other party's supporters, as Grassley charges, is the dispute now sitting on the Senate's own record.
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