Declassified memos show Jack Smith’s team tracked Trump defense lawyers and reporters by monitoring chief of staff Susie Wiles’ phone during the Mar-a-Lago documents probe.
FBI agents working with special counsel Jack Smith used a pen register and trap-and-trace device on Susie Wiles’ phone to log calls and texts with Trump’s legal team, campaign advisers, and journalists, according to newly released internal memos. The monitoring sat inside a probe codenamed Plasmic Echo, opened to examine classified documents taken to Mar-a-Lago after Trump’s first term.
Just the News reported that the White House Government Transparency Task Force released the memos this week. The records show agents reviewing Wiles’ telephonic activity from at least February through May 2023, including contacts with at least 21 lawyers tied to Trump and at least five journalists.
Wiles later became Trump’s chief of staff. In November 2022, after he announced his third campaign, he named her co-campaign manager. Agents treated her phone as a window into the broader defense and political circle around the former president.
The investigation did not start small. In March 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray sent a memo to Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco seeking approval to open a Sensitive Investigative Matter that became Plasmic Echo.
Monaco wrote on the memo, “I recommend you approve,” and initialed it “LM.” Garland signed with his initials days later, giving the green light at the highest levels of the Justice Department.
"I recommend you approve,"
Monaco’s notation appears on the March 2022 memorandum for the attorney general. That approval set the stage for years of investigative tactics that reached far beyond storage rooms at Trump’s Palm Beach estate.
Those tactics later drew sharper scrutiny on Capitol Hill, including a House Judiciary report on Biden-era DOJ surveillance of GOP lawmakers during the same era of Trump investigations.
A pen register and trap-and-trace tool records the numbers, times, and durations of calls and texts to and from a target line. It does not capture the content of conversations. FBI personnel still treated the Wiles feed as live intelligence.
On March 24, 2023, an FBI employee in the Washington Field Office wrote that the office was “continuing to review the PR/TT on Wiles’s phone number” and had just watched a Trump-affiliated lawyer call her.
"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."
An intelligence analyst’s late-February note was just as granular. It logged a news call with the same clinical detail used for lawyers.
"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,"
Most lawyer and journalist names remain redacted in the released files. Current FBI Director Kash Patel and Just the News founder John Solomon appear among the unredacted contacts flagged in the broader set of records.
Separate records in related Smith inquiries have already shown how far phone data collection could run, including findings that Smith’s team accessed text messages of 44 lawmakers while bypassing internal safeguards.
On April 7, 2023, FBI agents interviewed Wiles in Jacksonville, Florida. Three days later, the Washington Field Office reviewed her phone activity specifically “to determine contacts of interest on the date of her FBI interview.”
Live-monitoring memos cover additional windows in early March, mid-April, and late May 2023. The pattern was steady: treat the chief of staff’s line as a map of who was talking to Trump world while the documents case advanced.
That same investigative machine also pulled a 72-page Federal Election Commission Form 3X for Trump’s Save America PAC, detailing receipts, disbursements, donors, and vendors. Agents checked political endorsements and social media as well.
On February 6, 2023, a member of Smith’s team emailed about former Trump national security adviser Robert O’Brien.
"I'm going through all of it, and it looks like O'Brien is active in endorsing Republican candidates,"
The same email pressed the FBI for more.
"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."
Two days later, Jack Smith subpoenaed O’Brien. The sequence was fast: political activity noted, social media requested, compulsory process issued.
Senators were not spared either. Smith’s team obtained phone records of several senators by subpoena and secured a non-disclosure order so carriers would not tip them off. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., later sued Smith, arguing the collection was an unauthorized intrusion into her civil rights. Related reporting has detailed how a federal agent said Smith’s team hid that subpoenaed phone data belonged to members of Congress.
While agents watched phones and PAC filings, the Washington Field Office pushed back on the most aggressive step in the documents case. In a July 13, 2023 update on Plasmic Echo, an assistant special agent in charge told superiors the field office did not believe it had probable cause for a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago.
"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,"
The same memo said agents had repeatedly urged less invasive options, including going back through counsel.
"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,"
Field agents wanted a narrower path. Justice Department lawyers wanted a wide warrant covering the residence, office, and storage space at the Palm Beach estate. The disagreement sat on paper while the pen-register work on Wiles continued.
That tension fits a larger record of aggressive process in the Smith investigations, one that later produced a criminal referral from Jim Jordan alleging false testimony about lawmakers’ texts.
In recent Senate Judiciary Committee testimony, Smith denied that politics shaped his work. He framed the three-year effort as straight law enforcement.
"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 added a second line about his staff.
"And I would just add that if you knew the people I worked with, they would not either."
The memos show something more concrete than assurances. They show a Sensitive Investigative Matter approved by Garland and Monaco, a pen register on the campaign chief of staff’s phone, call-by-call logging of defense lawyers and reporters, social-media checks that preceded a subpoena, senator phone records under a gag order, and a field office that said it lacked probable cause for the Mar-a-Lago warrant while Main Justice pressed ahead.
Public fights over Smith’s conduct have not been limited to court filings. He has even appeared in political settings far from the prosecutor’s office, including coverage of when Jack Smith showed up in a ‘No Kings’ shirt at a protest festival near Washington.
The Plasmic Echo files do not describe a narrow hunt for missing folders. They describe a surveillance web built around the people closest to Trump, his lawyers, his advisers, his co-campaign manager, and the reporters who called them, while senior DOJ officials overrode their own field agents on the core search.
When federal investigators route a former president’s defense contacts through his chief of staff’s phone, voters are entitled to see the memos, the approvals, and the disagreements, not just the press conference version of the case.
