Jack Smith Grabbed Draft GOP Fundraising Emails, Too. Cruz: Up to 336 Texans Swept Up for Giving

Former special counsel Jack Smith's team obtained draft Republican fundraising emails and donor information on hundreds of President Trump's supporters, according to records first reported Thursday by the New York Post.

The drafts were appeals for the Trump Make America Great Again Committee, the joint fundraising arm of the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. In them, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas asked his supporters to give as "2020 Election Day Donors." Cruz told the Post that Smith's team swept up personal information on up to 336 Texans for nothing more than "exercising their constitutional right to participate in the political process."

Think about what that means. These were not bank records of a suspect. They were sales pitches still in draft form, and the names of ordinary people who might answer them.

"Arctic Frost represents the most egregious abuse of power in the history of the Department of Justice," Cruz said. "We still do not know the full extent of these and related violations, but we do know that there has been vastly insufficient accountability for the violations we do know about." He predicted it would go down as "Joe Biden's Watergate."

Where the records came from

The Post says Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa received the new files through legally protected whistleblower disclosures, the same channel that has produced every major Arctic Frost revelation over the past year. Arctic Frost was the FBI investigation of Trump allies after the 2020 election. Once Attorney General Merrick Garland named Smith special counsel in November 2022, it became the backbone of Smith's election case against Trump.

That case is dead. Smith dropped the charges after Trump won the 2024 election. But the data his team gathered did not go anywhere.

A net that kept getting bigger

Thursday's files are the newest piece of a pattern Grassley has been laying out document by document:

197 subpoenas. In October 2025, Grassley released 197 subpoenas Smith's team sent to 34 people and 163 businesses, seeking records on at least 430 Republican people and groups. "This was clearly a fishing expedition," Grassley said at the time.

Senators' phones. In 2023 the FBI obtained call logs from the personal phones of at least eight Republican senators and Rep. Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania for Jan. 4 to 7, 2021, the days around the certification of the electoral vote. The logs show who called whom, when and for how long, not what was said. Gag orders signed by U.S. District Judge James Boasberg barred Verizon and AT&T from telling the lawmakers for a year. Verizon handed over records. AT&T, which was asked for numbers tied to Cruz, pushed back, and Smith's office dropped that request.

4,782 checks. On Sept. 29, Grassley revealed that Smith's team collected at least 4,782 checks from Trump donors in all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico, many for $5 or $10, each showing a home address, bank account and routing numbers and a signature. Asked under oath whether his office obtained donor financial data, Smith answered, "Yes, we acquired financial information. As I sit here right now, I cannot recite to you every subpoena we issued."

639,000 people. On Oct. 14, a Grassley memo said subpoena returns covered at least 639,000 Republican donors, voters and supporters, more than 148,000 of them listed as donors. The spreadsheets held names, birth dates, home and email addresses, party registration, employers and jobs (janitor, doorman, pool tech, logger), donation amounts as small as $1 and the last four digits of credit cards. Some records went back to 2005, and some listed buyers of red MAGA hats and where they were shipped.

What nobody has explained

Smith has never laid out why an election case needed a senator's draft fundraising emails, or the personal details of people who might donate. Grassley says Smith's final public report never even mentioned it, a point he pressed at the Sept. 29 hearing: "Donations to Republican groups wasn't necessary to your investigation, which is proved out by the fact it wasn't mentioned in your public report."

Grassley's sharper point is about what happens now. "The Justice Department and FBI will forever possess thousands of people's addresses, phone numbers, banks, bank account numbers, bank routing numbers and copies of their true signatures," he told Smith.

Here is the plain version. Imagine giving $10 to a candidate and learning, six years later, that federal prosecutors filed away your name, your bank and your signature, not because you did anything, but because you were on the wrong side's mailing list. That is the line Arctic Frost crossed, and it is why Grassley keeps calling it a plan to "map out the entire Republican Party apparatus."

What happens next

Grassley says there may be more subpoena returns that hold more donor records, and he keeps calling on Senate Democrats to join the oversight instead of defending Smith. The files Cruz described are the first to show Smith's team reaching into a fundraising operation's drafts. With the midterms days away and Republicans asking their own donors to give again, the question for every one of them is simple: who else is on that list?