Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said Tuesday that former Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team obtained nearly 5,000 personal checks written by donors to President Donald Trump, citing legally protected whistleblower disclosures released during a hearing at which Smith testified.
According to a committee press release, Smith’s team “acquired at least 4,782 checks from Americans who made mainly small-dollar donations to President Trump between September 2019 to August 2023.” The checks were obtained through subpoenas and reveal donors’ bank account and routing numbers, signatures, and home addresses, the release said.
Grassley said the subpoenas reached donors in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The seized checks ranged from as little as $5 to as much as $1,000.
“No matter what you say, there’s no legitimate basis for what you did. Especially since your staff killed an investigation into the Clinton campaign,” Grassley said during the 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. 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.”
Grassley disclosed the checks alongside a separate finding that Smith’s team obtained communications from The Federalist and more than a dozen other media outlets during the investigation. Those Federalist communications reportedly surfaced in records the National Archives turned over after Smith’s office subpoenaed text messages from 87 phones used by officials during Trump’s first term.
Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis said in a statement Tuesday that the outlet is “still working to determine which of our reporters were targeted by Jack Smith and which journalistic communications he and his thugs seized.”
“The Federalist’s team of investigative reporters exposed the Russian collusion hoax. We exposed the Kavanaugh hoax. We exposed the Ukraine impeachment hoax. And The Federalist’s Editor-in-Chief Mollie Hemingway wrote the definitive account of how Democrats seized control of election infrastructure and destroyed the integrity of American elections in 2020,” Davis said. “For over a decade, The Federalist has fearlessly exposed Deep State corruption and DOJ lies and lawfare. Spying on us was apparently part of Jack Smith’s plot to get revenge against us.”
Davis said the outlet plans to examine “all legal options” in response to the disclosures.
