If you ever ordered a red MAGA hat and had it shipped to your front door, a new Senate memo says your name and address may have landed in the files of a special counsel’s office. And according to that memo, the hat orders were only a small piece of a much larger data haul.
The memo, released Wednesday, October 14, 2026, by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, says Jack Smith’s special counsel office and the Biden Justice Department obtained information on sales of red MAGA hats. That included individual buyers, what they purchased, and the shipping addresses for home delivery.
Grassley says the records also show that investigators obtained data on at least 639,000 Republican donors, voters and supporters. More than 148,000 rows in the spreadsheets were identified as donors.
The information described in the memo is deeply personal. It includes names, dates of birth, physical addresses, email addresses and voter registration details, along with donation amounts that in some cases were as small as one dollar.
The addresses cover most states and territories, and Grassley notes they include the home states of every member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. In other words, this was not a narrow slice of data about a handful of people.
The memo also says the data ranged from 2005 to 2021, years before Donald Trump ever ran for office and well outside the scope of what Smith was supposed to be reviewing. Grassley argues this corroborates his belief that the operation was designed to map out the Republican Party.
Investigators also obtained names of Trump campaign personnel and a catalogue of Trump campaign products, according to the memo. The attachments Grassley released are labeled Trump Save America Merchandise, Trump MAGA Hat Orders and Trump Victory.
This follows an earlier release on September 29, 2026, in which Grassley showed that Smith’s team collected at least 4,782 checks from Americans who donated to President Trump and Trump-aligned Republican entities. Those checks were written between September 2019 and August 2023.
Most of those donors gave small amounts, and some gave as little as one dollar. They lived in all 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The checks exposed their home addresses, bank account and routing numbers, and signatures.
The probe that produced all of this is known as Arctic Frost. It began as Smith’s investigation of then-former President Trump’s challenge to the 2020 election outcome. It then expanded to collect data from dozens of Republican members of Congress, as well as Trump supporters.
Among the members of Congress swept up in the effort, according to reporting on the memo, were Grassley himself and House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, along with other critics of FBI practices such as former House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes.
Grassley says his information comes from lawful whistleblower disclosures and subpoena returns his office recently reviewed. That matters, because it means the information did not come from a leak of rumors. It came from records that people inside the government chose to bring forward.
The chairman also says Smith did not give complete answers about donor data when he appeared before the committee on September 29. That is a serious charge, and it is one Smith will have the opportunity to answer.
According to the memo, the records were shared with FBI agents. Reporting on it adds that the Justice Department and the FBI still possess the sensitive donor information, including home addresses and banking details from the checks.
The central question is a simple one. Why would a prosecutor investigating the events surrounding the 2020 election need to know where a retiree in a small town had a hat delivered? Nobody has offered a convincing explanation yet.
