Jack Smith team tracked Trump defense lawyers’ calls by monitoring his chief of staff 's phone

Already in the crosshairs for spying on Congress, ex-prosecutor Jack Smith and his team monitored the activities of President Donald Trump’s legal defense team, journalists and campaign advisers using a pen register device that tracked the calls coming to and from his chief of staff Susie Wiles’ phone, according to newly declassified memos that reveal some of the FBI’s invasive tactics used to target Trump.

Just the News reported last week that Smith obtained the phone records of several senators through a subpoena and secured a non-disclosure order from the court preventing the mobile carrier from notifying the lawmakers affected. One of those senators, Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., filed a lawsuit against Smith arguing his spying constituted an unauthorized intrusion into her civil rights. 

The latest memos, released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force on Monday, show FBI agents assigned to Smith’s team in a probe codenamed Plasmic Echo used a dragnet of data gathering tactics in the midst of the 2024 election to monitor phone calls, social media, political endorsements and other constitutionally protected activities in the name of determining whether Trump broke any laws when he brought classified documents to Mar-a-Lago after his first term.

The three-year probe of the ex-president — which put Joe Biden’s administration in charge of the legal fate of his GOP rival in the 2024 election — 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, the memos show.

In March 2022, Wray sent a memo to Garland and Monaco, seeking the attorney general’s approval to open a “Sensitive Investigative Matter” that would become Plasmic Echo. 

“I recommend you approve,” Lisa Monaco wrote at the end of the memo, leaving her initials “LM.” Days later, Garland signed the memo with his initials, giving his approval. 

You can read the memo below: 

Field agents raised concerns that top brass disregarded

The probe also made FBI agents at times uncomfortable, with a senior official at the bureau’s Washington, D.C. Field Office (WFO) counterintelligence unit and his team raising concerns that they did not have a justification to raid Trump’s Florida home and wanted to use a less invasive solution than a search warrant, the documents show.

“WFO does not believe (and has articulated to DOJ CES), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. DOJ has opined that they do, requesting a wide scope including residence, office, storage space,” one Assistant Special Agent in Charge wrote in a July 13, 2023, update on the Plasmic Echo probe. 

In that same memo, the agent laid out alternative methods for resolution, rather than executing a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s Palm Beach, Florida estate, including by asking “to speak with” the former president and his counsel directly. 

“A reasonable step would be to recontact the attorney and inquire about any further documents. WFO has made numerous suggestions to DOJ over the course of this investigation that the most expedient way to ensure recovery of all classified documents would be to go through [redacted] DOJ has persistently disagreed,” the agent also wrote.

You can read the memo below:

Smith has denied wrongdoing and last week in congressional testimony suggested he would pursue Trump all over again, denying politics was ever involved in his probe.

“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,” he told the Senate Judiciary Commitee. “And I would just add that if you knew the people I worked with, they would not either.”

The newly released memos show an intense focus on two constitutionally protected activities — Trump’s right to a legal defense and the normal activities of a presidential campaign. After the Justice Department and the FBI began their investigations into the then-former president, Trump announced his third campaign for the Oval Office in November 2022 and appointed Wiles to serve as co-campaign manager. 

Smith had agents track Wiles’ phone calls and text messages in secret

The memos released Monday by the White House show that FBI investigators were tracing Wiles’ phone calls and text messages with at least 21 lawyers affiliated with Trump, numerous campaign staff, political advisors, and at least five journalists from at least February to May 2023. 

The lawyers' names and the journalists' identities were redacted except for current FBI Director Kash Patel and Just the News founder John Solomon.

For example, on March 24, 2023, one FBI employee wrote: “Good afternoon, WFO is continuing to review the PR/TT on Wiles's phone number and observed that [Lawyer 7] called Wiles at 2:04pm this afternoon for 41 seconds. [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. These are the only contacts we have observed between the two of them since the PR/TT's inception.” 

PR/TT is an acronym for pen register and trap and trace, the mechanisms used to track phone calls.

“There is nothing significant to report on the PR/TT. Today, an ABC News reporter called her at 8:48 AM for 2 minutes and 36 seconds,” one intelligence analyst wrote in late February as the classified documents investigation began to ramp up. 

In one instance, the FBI specifically targeted Wiles’ communication records to understand who she was in contact with before and after her interview with FBI agents on April 7, 2023, in Jacksonville, Florida. “On 10 April 2023, WFO [redacted] reviewed WILES's telephonic activity to determine contacts of interest on the date of her FBI interview,” one memo reads. You can read it below: 

You can see other examples below: 

The records also show agents combed through entire filings of Trump’s political action committee with its donors and campaign expenses, set up a social media monitoring effort and even used personal political endorsements as leverage against a key witness.

The White House released one example, a Federal Election Commission Form 3X belonging to Trump’s "Save America PAC," which detailed the committee’s receipts and disbursements. The report is 72 pages long and provides information on the PAC’s donors and vendors. 

You can read that file below:

One memo recounts how the FBI sought to pressure former Trump National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien when he was declining to volunteer for an interview by checking his political endorsements of candidates.

“I'm going through all of it, and it looks like O'Brien is active in endorsing Republican candidates,” one member of Jack Smith’s team wrote on February 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? Has he endorsed Trump again? Thanks.” 

You can read that email below: 

Just two days later, Jack Smith subpoenaed O’Brien to participate in his investigation. 

Editor's Note: John Solomon is working as an unpaid Special Government Employee as the chairman of the White House Government Transparency Task Force and has taken a leave of absence as Editor-in-Chief of Just the News while he serves in that role.