Jack Smith Seized Nearly 5,000 Checks Written By Trump Donors

Special Counsel Jack Smith seized nearly 5,000 personal checks written by donors to President Donald Trump, according to new whistleblower disclosures.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released the bombshell findings during a Tuesday hearing featuring testimony from Smith about his lawfare against Trump. The information was disclosed via legally protected whistleblower disclosures.

According to a committee press release, Smith and his team “acquired at least 4,782 checks from Americans who made mainly small-dollar donations to President Trump between September 2019 to August 2023.” Obtained via subpoenas, the checks disclose the donor’s bank account and routing numbers, signatures, and home addresses.

The subpoenas purportedly targeted Americans across all 50 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, according to Grassley. Smith and his team targeted donations of varying amounts, with some of the released checks showing amounts 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 Tuesday’s 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.”

The committee chair released the damning finding alongside the bombshell revelation that Smith and his team obtained communications from The Federalist, along with more than a dozen other media outlets, as part of his anti-Trump lawfare. As The Federalist’s Brianna Lyman reported, The Federalist communications in question “appeared in records that the National Archives turned over after Smith’s office subpoenaed text messages from 87 phones used by officials in Trump’s first term.”

Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis said in a Tuesday statement that The Federalist 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 added that The Federalist plans to examine “all legal options” to tackle Smith’s lawfare.