U.S. Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA) accused President Trump’s Freedom 250 team of harvesting the personal data of Americans who signed up for free Freedom 250 events or bought Freedom 250 merchandise.
Huffman wrote: “This is insane. If you signed up for a free event or even bought some 250th merch, your data was probably harvested by Trump’s campaign. Our investigation found that Trump’s Freedom 250 secretly harvested Americans’ personal data to track them and try to influence the upcoming midterms, using America’s 250th birthday as cover.”
This is insane. If you signed up for a free event or even bought some 250th merch, your data was probably harvested by Trump’s campaign.
Our investigation found that Trump’s Freedom 250 secretly harvested Americans’ personal data to track them and try to influence the upcoming… pic.twitter.com/kMMWAQPMZ1
— Rep. Jared Huffman (@RepHuffman) September 8, 2026
Huffman added: “We’re getting federal watchdogs and the committee that oversees the election process involved to get the full extent of what happened and hold those responsible accountable.”
Huffman, the Ranking Member on the House Natural Resources Committee, and Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY), the Ranking Member on the Committee on House Administration, asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether federal resources were used to build a voter contact list for Trump and his political allies.
[NOTE: Event registration for Freedom 250 events, including the World Cup Fan Zone on the Mall and the Great American State Fair, was handled by Campaign Nucleus, a company founded by former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, who “helped engineer Trump’s 2016 presidential victory using Facebook ads.” The official merchandise store was operated by Ace Specialties, which supplied merchandise to Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns.]
USA Today reported that the RSVP page for the Freedom 250 kickoff event “directed attendees to sign up through a Trump-branded registration site, 45.donaldjtrump.com. And it required them to provide their email addresses and asked for their cellphone numbers.”
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, told USA Today: “It is deeply concerning that attendees are being forced to share personal data that then is almost certainly being monetized for partisan ends.”
Freedom 250 spokesperson Rachel Reisner told USA Today that the organization used registration data only for event communications and did not sell or share it with Trump-affiliated entities. She said the fundraising language in the registration process was accidentally inserted by a vendor and was removed.