According to newly released White House documents, former special counsel Jack Smith’s team monitored the phone and email metadata of Susie Wiles while she ran Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, and the travel of Trump family members.
The records show that investigators logged her contacts with journalists, defense attorneys, and political advisers.
The tracking covered Wiles’ communications with at least five journalists, 21 different defense attorneys, and several political advisers, the documents show.The outlets she contacted included CNN, The Washington Post, Politico, and Just the News, but most of the names of whom she contacted were redacted.
Wiles now serves as White House chief of staff.
Investigators obtained the information through a pen register, also known as a trap-and-trace device. The tool captures metadata such as the numbers a person calls and the times of those calls, but does not record what the parties said. The surveillance formed part of “Plasmic Echo,” the FBI’s name for the investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.
“These are First Amendment activities, reporting, social media, donating, political advice for campaigns, yet Jack Smith’s team seemed very interested in them,” a Trump administration official told reporters Friday.
An FBI memo dated March 10 included three pages of Wiles’ phone contacts. A separate memo recorded that agents interviewed Wiles on April 7, 2023, and showed her four pages of communications.
The documents also describe what investigators wanted from the records. According to the files, the FBI’s Washington Field Office and a redacted person or entity reviewed information associated with Wiles “to document WILES’s telephonic communication with FPOTUS Donald Trump’s attorneys and members of the 45 Office on and around 19 May 2023.” On that date, the Special Counsel’s Office informed the field office about correspondence with Trump’s retained counsel.
On February 3, 2023, the FBI sent preservation requests to Google, Microsoft, MSN, and Yahoo, asking those companies to retain Wiles’ email records. The bureau also maintained records of how many times she spoke to various people through internal emails. These records included only metadata, not the actual content of the emails. Her social media posts were also monitored.
Smith’s team even took interest in the political endorsements of Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser. “It looks like O’Brien is active in endorsing Republican candidates,” an FBI email from Feb. 6, 2023, said. “Can FBI please look at his social media and see if there’s anything of relevance we would want to ask him about?”
The release came days after the Senate Judiciary Committee found that Smith’s investigators collected communications of numerous media organizations while investigating Trump and his allies. The committee’s list included 60 Minutes, the AP, Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, CNN, Fox News, the Los Angeles Times, The Mark Levin Show, the Media Research Center, NBC, NPR, New York Magazine, Reuters, The Federalist, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
Records also show that agents tracked the travel of then former first lady Melania Trump and Barron Trump’s travel while the raid on Mar-a-Lago was being planned.
The release also included records of internal deliberations before the 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago. In a June 1, 2022, email, sent two months before the controversial raid, an FBI assistant special agent urged discretion and cooperation with Trump’s lawyers.
“Even as we continue down the path towards a search warrant, I believe that a reasonable conversation with the former President’s attorney [redacted] ought not be discounted,” the agent, whose name was redacted, wrote.
The same agent argued that the bureau could secure the documents through Trump’s lawyers while the investigation continued.
“At a minimum, even if the President’s attorney is correct and that the documents were all declassified (or believed to be declassified), it can be reasonably argued that the documents remain sensitive and should be properly secured until the matter of classification is sorted out,” the agent wrote. “This conversation could easily be accomplished at the same time that WFO presses forward with the investigation and continues building out the search warrant.”
The released documents do not say how Smith’s team responded to that recommendation.
“Jack Smith’s surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power. Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis told Fox News Digital. “Those responsible must be held accountable.”
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) responded to the disclosures in a post on X.
Again: this is objectively a bigger scandal than Watergate. The main difference is that the Democrat establishment & media happily look the other way when the DOJ is used to spy upon Donald Trump’s campaign chief, with no regard for the dangerous precedent set.
— Mike Lee (@SenMikeLee) October 5, 2026
“It’s hard to think of good justifications for this. To me, it feels a little Nixonian,” he said. “If this report is true, then it’s pretty bad. If true, then those in charge at the time better have some darn good explanations for surveillance of family members and advisors talking privately to lawyers or exercising their free-speech rights with the news media.”
