In Jack Smith’s America, the mere act of buying a red MAGA hat was enough to land your name and home address in the files of a massive federal criminal investigation. According to the latest revelations from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, Smith’s operation obtained detailed personal information on “at least 639,000 Republican donors, voters and supporters.”
The implications of this brazen abuse of federal investigative power extend far beyond Donald Trump. And I can now attest from firsthand experience just how much damage the fear of government scrutiny is already doing to conservative organizations.
Since launching the Counterlawfare Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, on July 4, I have been overwhelmed by the generosity and encouragement of people who believe in our mission. One interesting observation has been the preference among our more substantial donors for remaining anonymous. We established a Founders Circle to recognize their generosity, yet every single donor declined public recognition. I was hardly surprised. Conservatives often prefer to give quietly, without seeking recognition, whereas association with Democrat causes is frequently something people proudly advertise.
But I have also encountered an entirely separate phenomenon that is deeply disturbing and has far-reaching implications. I have been contacted by people who want to support our work but say they cannot because of the financial trail they would leave behind.
To be clear, their concerns have nothing to do with my organization. They know we would never disclose their identities. What worries them is that every financial transaction leaves a trail, whether through banks, credit card companies, or payment processors, and that government officials could trace those transactions and use the information against them, exposing them to harassment or retaliation.
We even established a separate donation mechanism under which contributors can remain completely anonymous to the institute itself. We would have no way of knowing who had donated. Yet this did little to alleviate the underlying concern because people understand perfectly well that their transactions would still leave records elsewhere in the financial system.
As a result, Americans who want to support a perfectly lawful, tax-exempt organization are left worrying about what their own government might do with that information.
And after the latest Jack Smith revelations, who can blame them?
According to Grassley’s memorandum, the records Smith obtained included more than 148,000 entries identified as donors, some of whom had contributed as little as $1. The information collected included names, birthdates, home addresses, employers, occupations, political affiliations, donation histories, and credit card details, with some records dating back to 2005. An earlier disclosure revealed that investigators had also obtained at least 4,782 personal checks from Republican donors across all 50 states, complete with bank account numbers, routing numbers, home addresses, and signatures.
And now we learn that Smith’s team also seized payroll records from the Conservative Partnership Institute, including employees’ medical, dental, and vision insurance information, plus the organization’s bank statement.
What legitimate purpose could collecting all of this have served in an investigation supposedly centered on the events surrounding the 2020 election?
In fact, the only conceivable explanation is that the Jack Smith operation was mapping the entire conservative donation and support ecosystem for nefarious purposes, identifying who supported Republican candidates and causes, who gave money, how much they gave, where they could be found, and collecting every conceivable detail of their personal lives that might one day be weaponized against them.
When Smith appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee just last month, he defended his operation and insisted his investigations had followed Justice Department rules. There was no contrition nor even recognition of the enormity of what he had done to ordinary Americans whose only connection to the investigation was that they were conservatives.
Perhaps Smith is so untroubled because being exposed is no setback at all. After all, the revelations themselves send a powerful message to anyone thinking of supporting a conservative cause. If discouraging that support was part of the objective, the publicity surrounding the operation may serve that purpose just as effectively as the operation itself.
Just this week, Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., openly declared that she wants prosecutions of Trump administration officials to frighten young Americans away from working in the administration, even boasting that the people in Trump’s orbit “have no immunity the way the president does.” When a sitting United States senator so openly embraces political intimidation, is it any wonder that ordinary conservatives fear even a simple donation could put a target on their backs?
We have already seen how far governments can go. In 2022, the Canadian government froze bank accounts linked to anti-Covid “vaccine” mandate protesters without court orders. People involved in a political protest suddenly found themselves cut off from their own money.
And political debanking has already happened in America. A new report from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, a bureau within the Treasury Department, reveals that major U.S. banks denied financial services to politically disfavored customers, with their screening systems even flagging terms such as “MAGA” and “America First” as supposed reputational risks.
Once government officials have access to detailed financial records identifying who supports which political causes, the possibilities for retaliation, harassment, and intimidation are almost limitless.
For conservatives, the distrust of government runs particularly deep.
During the Obama administration, the Internal Revenue Service was caught systematically targeting Tea Party and other conservative organizations seeking tax-exempt status. Groups were singled out because of their political views, subjected to intrusive scrutiny, and forced to endure prolonged delays. The scandal demonstrated that even agencies supposedly entrusted with administering the law impartially could turn their powers against Americans because of their political beliefs.
That experience left a deep distrust of federal institutions among conservatives, particularly those involved in political and charitable organizations. Smith’s operation has now made those fears much more personal by reaching directly into the financial records of ordinary Americans who supported Republican candidates and causes.
The consequences for conservative fundraising are devastating. Fundraising is difficult enough without prospective donors having to worry that their names, home addresses, employers, and financial information might one day end up in a government investigative file.
Perhaps the most insidious aspect of this problem is that the damage is impossible to measure. We will never know how much money was never donated, how many initiatives went unfunded, or how many conservative causes never got off the ground because their supporters were too afraid to leave a financial trail.
Congressional investigations alone are nowhere near sufficient to address abuses of this magnitude. The Department of Justice must reconstruct how these records were collected, how they were used, who had access to them and, crucially, where they are now. And can anyone guarantee that Democrat lawfare operatives do not now possess detailed files on hundreds of thousands of Republican supporters?
There must also be accountability for the abuses. If Jack Smith can amass sensitive information on hundreds of thousands of Americans, including people who did nothing more than buy a hat, and the worst consequence he might face is spending a few hours before a Senate committee, this will not deter the next Jack Smith. Without actual consequences, the next operation will only be more brazen, more intrusive, and more dangerous.
We have reached a point in America where people are afraid to exercise their most basic constitutional rights because they fear their own government. That is the kind of fear Americans once associated with police states, where citizens learn to keep their political convictions to themselves because they never know when those convictions might be used against them.
What sickens me most is that I can now tell you from firsthand experience just how effectively these tactics are working.
Hans Mahncke is the founder of the Counterlawfare Institute. He holds LL.B., LL.M. and Ph.D. degrees in law. He is the author of "Swiftboating America: Exposing the Russiagate Fraud, from the Steele Dossier to the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane Investigation."