Newly declassified records are raising fresh questions about how far Jack Smith’s investigators were willing to go. According to documents released Monday, his team tracked the phone contacts of Susie Wiles, now the White House chief of staff, and in doing so mapped her communications with Donald Trump’s defense lawyers.
The records were released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force, which is led by Just the News founder John Solomon. They show investigators examined Wiles’ contacts with at least 21 defense attorneys, at least five journalists, and a number of political advisers.
The operation is labeled “Plasmic Echo” in the files. It was part of the classified documents investigation, the probe that laid the groundwork for the case against the former president over records at Mar-a-Lago.
According to the records, FBI agents assigned to Smith’s team used a pen register and trap-and-trace device on Wiles’ phone between February and May 2023. In plain English, that is a tool that captures who called whom, when, and for how long.
It is important to be precise about what that means. A pen register collects call metadata, not the content of conversations. The records do not establish what Wiles and her contacts discussed.
Metadata still tells a story. A prosecutor who knows which defense lawyers a key Trump adviser called, and at what hour, can sketch the contours of a legal strategy without ever hearing a word.
One memo describes investigators reviewing Wiles’ communications around May 19, 2023, the same day Smith’s office reported correspondence with Trump’s retained counsel. The stated purpose, according to the released excerpt, was to document her telephone contact with Trump’s attorneys and members of his post-presidential office.
Another memo shows investigators reviewing her phone activity around an April 2023 FBI interview to identify who she called immediately afterward. A March 10 memo reportedly contained three pages of her phone contacts, and she was later shown four pages of communications.
The list of contacts reportedly went beyond lawyers. It included political advisers, campaign personnel, and journalists from outlets that include CNN and The Washington Post. Records also reportedly show investigators digging into Trump PAC records and political endorsements.
For conservatives, the journalist angle is a red flag of its own. They argue that monitoring reporters’ contacts with a political operative chills the press and touches activity protected by the First Amendment.
Republican Senator Mike Lee went further than most, calling the revelation a bigger scandal than Watergate. Senator Josh Hawley has called for Smith to be disbarred, and Fox News legal commentator Jonathan Turley has written that the secret surveillance of Wiles and FBI Director Kash Patel should alarm everyone.
Turley noted the Trump administration has learned that both Patel and Wiles were targeted in 2022 and 2023 when they were private citizens. Patel is reportedly among the political advisers whose contacts appear in the Wiles records.
At the time, Wiles was a private citizen and a key Trump adviser who would go on to lead his 2024 campaign. Today she runs the White House. That means the person now managing the president’s daily operation was once the subject of a federal phone-tracking effort tied to his prosecution.
The Wiles revelation does not stand alone. Smith has already been subpoenaed by House Republicans over his handling of the Trump cases and the related Arctic Frost operation, and has testified before the House Judiciary Committee. Republicans have accused his team of casting an overly wide net across Trump allies.
Smith has rejected the claim that politics shaped his work, and he has repeatedly said his investigations followed the facts and the law. His defenders note that pen registers are a standard investigative tool and that courts must authorize their use.
That defense leaves a lot of unanswered questions. Why was it necessary to examine the phone contacts of someone who was a witness rather than a target? Who approved each step, and what did prosecutors do with the information about her contacts with Trump’s lawyers?
Conservatives also want to know whether the information was ever shielded from the prosecution team to protect attorney-client privilege, a safeguard that matters most when the people being mapped are defense counsel. The released records do not answer that.
The task force says more declassified material is on the way. Republicans in Congress are already vowing to dig deeper, and Smith’s name keeps surfacing in each new release.
The key question now is what else is sitting in the files. If the Wiles tracking is only one chapter of Plasmic Echo, the next pages could change how Americans view the investigation that dominated the last years of the Biden era.
