FBI Tracked Susie Wiles Phone, Email Communications With Journalists, Lawyers, Political Advisors, New Documents Show
Former special counsel Jack Smith monitored the phone communications of Susie Wiles when she was Donald Trump’s campaign chief in 2024, newly released documents show.
This included her communications with at least five journalists, 21 different defense attorneys, and several political advisers.
Smith’s team obtained the information through what is called a pen register, sometimes called a trap-and-trace device. This does not access the content of conversations. Rather, it’s a surveillance tool that records metadata, such as the numbers called and the times of the calls.
Most names were redacted, but the documents show the news outlets she was in contact with included CNN, The Washington Post, Politico, and Just the News.
This was part of the “Plasmic Echo” investigation of Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.
An FBI memo on March 10 included three pages of phone contacts for Wiles. A memo noted that on April 7, 2023, the FBI interviewed Wiles, now White House chief of staff, and then showed her four pages of communications.
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“On 19 May 2023, the Special Counsel’s Office informed the FBI Washington Field Office of correspondence with retained counsel for Former President Donald Trump that same day,” the documents released by the White House show. “The documents said the Washington field office and another person or entity that is redacted reviewed information associated with Susan WILES to document WILES’s telephonic communication with FPOTUS [former president] Donald Trump’s attorneys and members of the 45 Office on and around 19 May 2023.”
The FBI also sent preservation requests on Feb. 3, 2023, to Google, Microsoft, MSN, and Yahoo, asking the technology companies to preserve Wiles’ email information.
The documents show that the FBI sent internal emails throughout February detailing how many times Wiles was in contact with various people. In this case, it was metadata and not email contents.
The documents also show the investigators tracked social media posts.
Further, Smith’s team expressed interest in the political endorsements of Trump’s former national security adviser, Robert O’Brien.
“It looks like O’Brien is active in endorsing Republican candidates,” said an FBI email on Feb. 6, 2023. “Can FBI please look at his social media and see if there’s anything of relevance we would want to ask him about?”
The subject line of the message was, “Ambassador O’Brien Has he endorsed Trump again?”
A Trump administration official told 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 emerged days after the Senate Judiciary Committee found that Smith’s investigators, in the course of investigating Trump and allies, scooped up communications of, among others, 60 Minutes, The Associated Press, 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.
The documents further show that the FBI met with Obama administration CIA Director John Brennan on Nov. 3, 2023, to discuss expert testimony in the classified documents case against Trump. The FBI did not have notes from the conversation.
“FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) and counsel personnel met with former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John BRENNAN at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia,” a memo says. “The purpose of the meeting was to discuss expert testimony related to defense information in the forthcoming trial in the captioned investigation. No documents were shown in this meeting”
Brennan was a vocal critic of Trump and frequently appeared on MSNBC.
The White House also released documents showing deliberations about the 2022 raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
Two months before the raid, in a June 1, 2022, email, an FBI assistant special agent whose name was blacked out suggested discretion and cooperation with Trump’s attorneys.
“Even as we continue down the path towards a search warrant, I believe that a reasonable conversation with the former President’s attornev REDACTED ought not be discounted,” the assistant special agent said in the message. “At a minimum, even if the 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. This conversation could easily be accomplished at the same time that WFO presses forward with the investigation and continues building out the search warrant.”
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