Huffman, Morelle Demand Gov Watchdog Investigate Whether Trump’s Freedom 250 Harvested Americans’ Data to Influence the Midterm Elections

Huffman, Morelle Demand Gov Watchdog Investigate Whether Trump’s Freedom 250 Harvested Americans’ Data to Influence the Midterm Elections Letter details how event tickets and merchandise orders flowed through vendors owned by Trump’s former campaign manager and tied to the RNC and MAGA PACs September 08, 2026 Washington, D.C. – Today, House Natural Resources Committee Ranking Member Jared Huffman (D-Calif.) and Committee on House Administration Ranking Member Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.) sent an urgent request to the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether Freedom 250, Trump’s shadow organization that hijacked America’s 250th birthday, used federal resources to build a voter contact list for President Trump and his allies ahead of the midterms. “Based on our preliminary findings, President Trump and his allies are in a position to use information on American voters, harvested with taxpayer money and government resources, in an attempt to tip the scales in the upcoming midterm elections,” the lawmakers wrote. “This is a grave threat to Americans’ personal privacy and freedom from election interference, and we are asking the Government Accountability Office to investigate.” Watch Ranking Member Huffman discuss the findings. The letter builds on the Natural Resources Committee Democrats’ July 2 interim report , “From Vanity to Insanity,” which documented how Freedom 250 sidelined the congressionally chartered, nonpartisan America250 Commission and captured most of the $150 million Congress set aside for the semiquincentennial. According to the letter, every American who requested a free ticket to a Freedom 250 event on the National Mall submitted their name, email, phone number, and ZIP code into Campaign Nucleus – a system owned by Brad Parscale, the architect behind President Trump’s 2016 digital operation and 2020 campaign. A second Parscale company, Dyspatchit, handles Freedom 250’s email and text messaging, which collects billing and mailing addresses. A third Trump campaign-affiliated company, Ace Specialties, runs the official Freedom 250 merchandise storefront and also collects billing and mailing addresses, as well as other contact information. “A national contact list assembled at taxpayer expense, enriched with geolocation and behavioral data and scored for persuadability, is an asset of extraordinary value to a party heading into a midterm election,” the lawmakers wrote. Freedom 250’s operations are entangled with Trump and the GOP’s political ambitions, according to the letter. Freedom 250 asked Americans registering for free July 4 tickets to consent to “alerts [and] donation requests,” then sent them links to a Trump-branded WinRed site soliciting donations of up to $5,000 for the Never Surrender PAC. Freedom 250 blamed a vendor mistake, yet registrants went on to receive emails carrying Freedom 250’s name and logo from an address on the Trump campaign’s own domain, and federal records show Never Surrender pays the same vendor that runs Freedom 250’s email program. “In either scenario, it is clear that Freedom 250 and the Trump campaign are co-mingling their activities and using Freedom 250’s collected data to point registrants to a campaign PAC’s website,” the lawmakers wrote. The letter warns that no federal privacy law protects this data because of Freedom 250’s intentional structure as a nonprofit subsidiary, and that its own privacy policy names no data protection manager, sets no retention limit, and permits vendors to “disclose, share, and use your information.” The board that controls Freedom 250 now includes multiple Trump campaign architects and a former president of the firm that handles voter data for the Republican National Committee. The data privacy concerns stretch beyond elections. The Patriot Games application, processed through Parscale’s system, required teens aged 14 to 17 to post public introduction videos and hand over their personal social media handles. The competition itself lasted three days in August, yet parents were asked to sign over open-ended rights to their child’s name, image, and likeness with no expiration date and for use by Freedom 250 itself, meaning the data was never confined to the event. Minors who identified their age, school, and hometown on camera then became targets of hate, harassment, and obscene comments by online trolls who weaponized this data. “Freedom 250’s solicitation of teens’ videos with little respect for their privacy adds evidence to their pattern of being cavalier with Americans’ data,” the lawmakers wrote. Huffman and Morelle asked GAO to produce a full list of Freedom 250’s vendors and their political clients, determine how much federal money paid for data collection services, identify what safeguards, if any, stop the data from reaching political committees, assess potential violations of appropriations and campaign finance law, and recommend options for closing the privacy gaps that allow a federally funded nonprofit to run a nationwide data collection operation at the President’s behest. Read the full letter here. ### Print Email Tweet Previous Article