Newly declassified FBI memos show the Biden Justice Department logged Susie Wiles' phone contacts for months and tracked Melania and Barron Trump's travel while planning the August 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago. The White House Government Transparency Task Force released the records on Monday, and they paint a picture of an investigation that reached far past a dispute over classified papers and straight into Trump's inner circle.
The nine memos come from Operation Plasmic Echo, the FBI's classified-documents probe that special counsel Jack Smith later took over and used to charge President Trump. A federal judge dismissed those charges in July 2024, ruling Smith had not been lawfully appointed, but the newly released files show how the bureau operated while the case was alive.
KUTV 2News reports on the newly released memos showing the FBI tracked the Trump family's travel and monitored Susie Wiles' phone contacts.
The surveillance came in two tracks. In late May 2022, an email among FBI agents listed the steps toward a search warrant, including one item: "Finalize FBI understanding of FPOTUS/FLOTUS/minor son's travel (type of aircraft and specific timeline)." A separate note said any search would be served after the former president left Mar-a-Lago. The raid went ahead on August 8, 2022, and covered Trump's office and both of the couple's bedrooms. Barron Trump was a minor at the time.
Then came the phone monitoring. From at least February through May 2023, agents used a pen register and trap-and-trace on Wiles' phone while she was running Trump's 2024 campaign as co-campaign manager. The tools captured who called whom, when, and for how long, but not the contents of conversations. The logs mapped her contacts with at least 21 Trump-affiliated lawyers, campaign staff, political advisers, Trump Organization personnel, and at least five journalists. On one day in March 2023, the records show 39 calls in an evening window. Agents even logged when Melania Trump called Wiles, which phone the first lady used, and how long the call lasted. A May 19, 2023 entry records a 16-minute call from Trump's vanity number.
The memos also show the pressure came from the top. A March 24, 2022 memo shows then-FBI Director Christopher Wray asking Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco to approve a Sensitive Investigative Matter, because the investigation could rope in a declared candidate and senior campaign staff. Monaco wrote, "Merrick, I recommend you approve," and Attorney General Merrick Garland signed. Wray himself warned the probe could be "disruptive to the democratic process if publicly disclosed prior to an election." Months later, on July 13, 2022, the Washington Field Office's counterintelligence chief told the DOJ he did not believe agents had established probable cause for the search warrant. The department disagreed and wanted the wider search anyway.
The White House called the revelations an abuse of power. "Jack Smith's surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power," spokeswoman Lauren Bis said in a statement. "Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple. Those responsible must be held accountable."
Smith's defenders say otherwise. Smith told the Senate Judiciary Committee last week that politics did not play a role in his work and that he would pursue the case again. And even a former Democratic House Judiciary Committee counsel, Julian Epstein, called the tactics "a little Nixonian," saying it was "hard to think of good justifications" for surveilling family members and advisers talking privately to lawyers or exercising free-speech rights with the media. The White House released the files as part of its transparency push, and the memos raise fresh questions about how far a Biden-era Justice Department was willing to go.