WASHINGTON — The FBI monitored the travel of Melania and Barron Trump and tapped the cellphone of Susie Wiles, who would later become President Trump’s White House chief of staff, during special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into whether Trump illegally retained national security documents at Mar-a-Lago after his first term.
According to documents released Monday by the White House, agents tracked the first family’s travel while determining the best time to search Trump’s Palm Beach residence. In the months after the August 2022 raid, investigators also monitored Wiles’ phone to track her communications with Trump’s defense lawyers.
The surveillance, conducted during Joe Biden’s presidency, was part of a secret investigation code-named “Plasmic Echo.”
Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland approved the wiretaps following a recommendation from then-FBI Director Christopher Wray. In a May 2022 memo, Wray warned that the sensitive investigation could involve senior figures from the 45th president’s administration and “could potentially be disruptive to the democratic process if publicly disclosed prior to an election.”
Wray nonetheless urged Garland to authorize the surveillance, adding a handwritten note at the bottom of the memo: “Merrick, I recomend you approve. CW.”
At the time, Wiles was overseeing Trump’s political operation as he prepared for the 2024 presidential campaign.
The FBI’s actions were detailed in a collection of documents released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force.
An email exchange among FBI agents, whose names were redacted, described the bureau’s preparations in late May 2022. The steps included completing the search warrant for Mar-a-Lago, contacting the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, which had jurisdiction at the time, and closely monitoring Donald, Melania and Barron Trump.
One item on the agents’ checklist read: “Finalize FBI understanding of FPOTUS/FLOTUS/minor son’s travel (type of aircraft and specific
timeline).” The final two tasks were to “swear out the warrant” and
“finalize all coordination between FBI/DOJ/USSS” in West Palm Beach.
Another document stated that any search warrants would be executed only after the former president left Mar-a-Lago.
About a month before the raid, an unnamed special agent questioned whether the bureau had legal authority to search the former president’s office or bedroom and recommended additional discussions with Trump’s attorneys.
The FBI ultimately conducted the raid on Aug. 8, 2022, searching Trump’s office as well as the bedrooms belonging to both members of the former first couple.
The newly released records also detail the monitoring of Wiles’ cellphone from February through May 2023. Agents tracked calls involving nearly two dozen lawyers connected to Trump, along with campaign aides, political advisers and several journalists. The identities of those individuals were redacted, except for current FBI Director Kash Patel, who was not working for the government at the time.
Investigators also logged Wiles’ calls with Trump, identifying the former president as using a “vanity number” — a phone number that spells out a memorable word. The records do not disclose the word. Instead, they simply documented calls such as one listed on May 19, 2023: “2:05 pm The FPOTUS Vanity Number called WILES for 16 minutes and 11 seconds.”
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The daily logs show that Wiles’ phone was in almost constant use, with an incoming or outgoing call recorded roughly every 10 minutes.
For example, Wiles made or received 39 calls on March 9, 2023:
The bureau’s Washington Field Office noted “that [Lawyer 7] called Wiles at 2:04pm this afternoon for 41 seconds,” one March, 24, 2023, email stated.
“[Lawyer 7] first called Wiles at 2:10pm EST on March 21, and Wiles returned his call for 1 minute and 34 seconds later that day at 2:59pm,” a bureau agent wrote. “These are the only contacts we have observed between the two of them since the PR/TT’s inception.”
Another late February missive from an FBI intelligence analyst noted that “an ABC News reporter called her at 8:48 AM for 2 minutes and 36 seconds.”
By April of 2023, Wiles had sat down with FBI agents for an interview in Jacksonville, Fla., and later had her communication records both immediately before and after that sitdown queried.
“On 10 April 2023, WFO [redacted] reviewed WILES’s telephonic activity to determine contacts of interest on the date of her FBI interview,” another memo noted.
On that date, Wiles talked to former President Trump and several of his lawyers. She also received calls from a Washington Post reporter and Politico’s Florida bureau chief.
At the time of the surveillance, Smith’s investigation was focused on grand jury proceedings regarding potential obstruction of justice and whether Trump had claimed falsely that all classified documents had been returned to the National Archives.
The documents case against Trump was thrown out in July 2024 by a federal judge who found Smith had been unlawfully appointed by Garland.
“Jack Smith’s surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said in a statement. “Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple. Those responsible must be held accountable.”