The FBI under Biden-era leadership secretly subpoenaed the phone records of two people who now sit at the commanding heights of the Trump administration: FBI Director Kash Patel and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
Patel disclosed the surveillance to Reuters on Wednesday, revealing that investigators working under Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained "toll records" detailing the timing and recipients of calls made by both Patel and Wiles during 2022 and 2023. At the time, both were private citizens.
Neither was charged with anything. Neither, as far as anyone can establish, was even a target. Reuters reported it could not independently ascertain whether Patel or Wiles were under investigation, or why.
Patel did not mince words:
"It is outrageous and deeply alarming that the previous FBI leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records – along with those of now White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles – using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight."
According to Newsmax, the subpoenaed records were toll records, which log the timing and recipients of calls but not the content of conversations. Under current law, the government may obtain such records via subpoena without a judge's approval.
That legal authority makes the collection technically permissible. It does not make it unremarkable. The FBI used that authority to vacuum up call data on a future White House chief of staff and a future FBI director, both of whom were private citizens whose primary offense appears to have been proximity to Donald Trump.
Patel said the records were filed under a classification the bureau calls "Prohibited," a designation he says made them nearly impossible to discover on FBI computer systems. He added that he recently ended the bureau's ability to categorize files that way. Patel also said he did not know the FBI's purpose in obtaining the records, and that the collection of Wiles' records extended into her time as Trump's co-campaign manager, though he did not specify when exactly the collection began or ended.
Reuters could not independently verify the full extent, timing, or motive behind the seizure of these records. It also could not establish what records the FBI obtained or who approved the subpoenas.
The subpoenas came during the period when Jack Smith, appointed special counsel by Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022, was investigating Trump's alleged retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Smith charged Trump with felonies in 2023. Trump denied wrongdoing.
Patel had publicly stated in 2022 that Trump had declassified the documents in question. That year, he was summoned before a grand jury after being given limited immunity from criminal charges. Both Patel and Wiles were interviewed by investigators as part of the probe.
The case was ultimately dismissed by a federal judge. Smith dropped his appeal after Trump won the 2024 election. On Monday, a federal judge permanently barred the Justice Department from releasing Smith's report on the documents investigation.
The entire prosecutorial apparatus that justified these subpoenas has now collapsed. The case is gone. The special counsel is gone. The report is sealed. What remains are the phone records of private citizens sitting on FBI servers.
This was not an isolated collection. Smith's investigators also previously seized phone records of U.S. senators and other Republican officials during his probe into alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. When questioned by Congress about those seizures, Smith argued that the records helped investigators "verify the timeline of events around the Jan. 6 Capitol riot" and that prosecutors "followed all legal requirements in getting those records."
Last month, Smith told lawmakers his office "followed Justice Department policies, observed legal requirements and took actions based on the facts and the law." Democrats in Congress have broadly defended Smith's conduct. A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment on Patel's specific allegations.
The appeal to procedural compliance is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. "We followed the rules" is not the same as "this was justified." The government can lawfully subpoena toll records without judicial approval. That low threshold is precisely the problem. When the standard for surveilling a political opponent's allies is nothing more than an administrative subpoena filed under a classification designed to avoid oversight, the process itself becomes the weapon.
Former President Biden did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Neither did former Attorney General Garland nor former FBI Director Chris Wray. Wiles also did not immediately comment.
That wall of silence from every official who presided over these decisions is worth noting. Smith has told Congress he is barred by court orders from discussing aspects of the probe not previously disclosed in court filings. The others face no such constraint. They simply have nothing to say.
Consider the timeline:
This is not the profile of a careful, narrowly tailored investigation. It is the profile of an apparatus that treated the political orbit of Donald Trump as inherently suspicious and used the lowest available legal threshold to cast the widest possible net.
Patel took over the FBI in February 2025. He has already moved to eliminate the "Prohibited" file classification that he says was used to bury the records. That is a concrete structural reform, not rhetoric.
The broader question is whether the institutions that enabled this conduct will face any meaningful reckoning. Smith testified under oath. Garland appointed him. Wray's FBI executed the subpoenas. The legal architecture that permitted all of it remains intact. Toll records can still be obtained without a judge. File classifications can still be used to limit internal visibility.
The left spent years warning about the dangers of political surveillance. They built careers on it during the post-Snowden era. They demanded reforms, insisted on oversight, and lectured anyone who would listen about the sanctity of civil liberties.
Then the target changed, and so did the principle.
The FBI secretly collected the phone records of two private citizens who now run the White House and the bureau itself. The case that justified it no longer exists. The people who authorized it won't speak. And the records are still there, filed in a system built to make sure nobody found them.