Jack Smith was keeping very close tabs on Susie Wiles while she was busy running Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. Newly released documents show Smith’s team used a surveillance tool to monitor her phone communications, including contacts with at least five journalists, 21 defense attorneys, and several political advisers.
The method used was a pen register, sometimes called a trap-and-trace device. It doesn’t capture the content of calls, but it records metadata like phone numbers dialed and the times of those calls. So no, they weren’t listening in on her conversations. They were just quietly cataloguing everyone she ever talked to. Totally normal stuff.
The news outlets Wiles was in contact with, according to the documents, included CNN, The Washington Post, Politico, and Just the News. Most names in the documents were redacted. The FBI also sent preservation requests on February 3, 2023, to Google, Microsoft, MSN, and Yahoo, asking them to hold onto Wiles’ email information. Again, metadata only, not content, but still a fairly aggressive level of interest in the woman running a presidential campaign.
All of this was part of what Smith’s team called the “Plasmic Echo” investigation into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. An FBI memo from March 10 included three pages of Wiles’ phone contacts, and on April 7, 2023, agents interviewed her and showed her four pages of her own communications. She’s now White House chief of staff, which makes the whole thing look even worse in hindsight.
The documents, released by the White House, show the FBI was also tracking social media posts and, get this, monitoring the political endorsements of Trump’s former national security adviser Robert O’Brien. An internal FBI email from February 6, 2023, with the subject line “Ambassador O’Brien Has he endorsed Trump again?” asked agents to scour his social media “to see if there’s anything of relevance we would want to ask him about.” Jack Smith surveillance of Trump allies A Trump administration official pushed back hard, telling reporters Friday, “These are First Amendment activities, reporting, social media, donating, political advice for campaigns, yet Jack Smith’s team seemed very interested in them.”
The new documents landed just days after the Senate Judiciary Committee revealed that Smith’s investigators had scooped up communications from a remarkable list of news organizations, including Fox News, the AP, Reuters, CBS, NBC, NPR, Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Federalist, and the Mark Levin Show, among many others. The documents also show the FBI met with Obama-era CIA Director John Brennan at CIA headquarters on November 3, 2023, to discuss expert testimony in the classified documents case. Brennan was a frequent and vocal Trump critic on MSNBC, which raises questions nobody seems to be in a hurry to answer.
Meanwhile, two months before the August 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid, an FBI assistant special agent actually urged caution in a June 1, 2022, email, suggesting a “reasonable conversation” with Trump’s attorneys before pursuing a search warrant. That advice, apparently, was not taken.
Congress will likely dig deeper into these documents, and the White House shows no signs of stopping the releases. Tell us what you think about the Jack Smith surveillance operation in the comments below or on social media, because this story is just getting started.
