The White House on Monday posted declassified FBI records from the bureau's investigation of Donald Trump's handling of classified documents, and they show that agents ran a pen register on the phone of Susie Wiles, now the White House chief of staff, while she was helping run Trump's third presidential campaign. From at least February to May 2023, the device traced her contacts with at least 21 lawyers affiliated with Trump, campaign staff, political advisers and at least five journalists, according to Just the News, which first published the records. The Daily Signal reported the same counts of lawyers and journalists.
FBI agents assigned to special counsel Jack Smith's team handled the monitoring in an investigation code-named Plasmic Echo. The White House Government Transparency Task Force released the files, and the administration's summary says the probe was approved at the highest levels of the Biden Justice Department, including by Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and FBI Director Christopher Wray. In March 2022, Wray sent Garland and Monaco a memo seeking the attorney general's approval to open a "Sensitive Investigative Matter" that would become Plasmic Echo, Just the News reported. Monaco wrote "I recommend you approve" at the end of the memo, and Garland initialed it days later.
A pen register records metadata, such as the numbers dialed and the times of calls, and does not capture what is said. Federal law bars anyone from installing or using one without first obtaining a court order, outside limited exceptions for communications providers. Neither Just the News nor The Daily Signal said whether the released files include the order that authorized the device on Wiles' phone.
Several entries describe single calls. On March 24, 2023, an FBI employee wrote that the Washington Field Office was "continuing to review the PR/TT on Wiles's phone number" and had seen a 41-second call to her from a lawyer identified only as Lawyer 7. An intelligence analyst wrote in late February that there was "nothing significant to report" and noted that an ABC News reporter had called her that morning. The names of lawyers and journalists are redacted, except those of Kash Patel, now the FBI director, and John Solomon, the founder of Just the News. The news outlets that appear in her records include CNN, The Washington Post, Politico and Just the News.
Investigators also studied her calls around her own FBI interview. On April 10, 2023, three days after agents interviewed her in Jacksonville, Florida, the field office reviewed her telephone activity to identify "contacts of interest" from the day of the interview. A memo notes that the FBI interviewed her that day and showed her four pages of communications. Earlier, on Feb. 3, 2023, the FBI had sent preservation requests for her email information to Google, Microsoft, MSN and Yahoo, and internal FBI emails that month tallied her contacts from metadata rather than message contents.
A Feb. 6, 2023, message in the files says Trump's former national security adviser, Robert O'Brien, "is active in endorsing Republican candidates" and asks the FBI to check his social media for anything investigators might want to ask him about. Smith subpoenaed O'Brien two days later, according to Just the News. 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 files also reach back before the 2022 search of Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. In a June 1, 2022, email, two months before the search, an FBI official whose name is blacked out wrote that "a reasonable conversation" with the former president's attorney "ought not be discounted" even as the bureau worked toward a search warrant. Another memo says field office and counsel personnel met former CIA Director John Brennan at CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia, on Nov. 3, 2023, to discuss expert testimony about defense information for the coming trial.
Smith has denied wrongdoing, and last week he told the Senate Judiciary Committee, "Anybody who has worked with me and knows me during the course of my career knows that I would not let politics play a role." Neither news report included a response from Garland, Monaco or Wray.
Just the News notes that Solomon chairs the transparency task force as an unpaid special government employee and has taken a leave of absence as the outlet's editor-in-chief. The release came days after the Senate Judiciary Committee found that Smith's investigators had swept up communications involving news organizations including The Associated Press, Fox News, NPR and The Washington Post.