For nearly nine consecutive years, the FBI ran four code-named counterintelligence operations targeting Donald Trump, his allies, his lawyers, his future chief of staff, members of Congress, journalists, and filmmakers. The full scope of that dragnet is only now coming into view, and what investigators are finding is worse than most Americans were led to believe.
Trump and his supporters were targeted by four consecutive FBI code-named counterintelligence investigations over the last decade that secretly subjected hundreds of innocent Americans to privacy-invading tactics and essentially treated the man twice elected president as a national security threat for most of the first nine years of his political career. The operations bore the code names Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, Plasmic Echo, and Arctic Frost. They ran from summer 2016 to January 2025.
FBI Director Kash Patel has personally led the effort to review those operations, uncovering evidence of a far-reaching dragnet that in some cases may have been predicated on false, misleading, or uncorroborated justifications. And much of that evidence was deliberately buried.
Many of the investigative files were hidden from view, even from most FBI agents, because they were marked "prohibited access" and controlled carefully by FBI leadership.
The breadth of who got swept up is staggering. The investigations stretched from summer 2016 to January 2025, ensnaring hundreds of Americans. That list included household names and private citizens alike.
According to the reporting, few inside Trump's orbit escaped: a dozen members of Congress and their staffers, future White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, journalists, campaign advisers, defense lawyers, and even Patel himself had their privacy pierced by warrants, wiretaps, FISA surveillance, phone record analysis, FBI assessments, or grand juries.
The Arctic Frost probe alone targeted nearly 400 conservative groups and individuals associated with Trump, according to evidence recently released by the House and Senate Judiciary Committees. That is not a targeted counterintelligence operation. That is a political purge dressed in federal badge authority.
Most of the files on Round River, Plasmic Echo, and Arctic Frost were buried from Patel's view when he arrived in what were known as prohibited access files, a tactic used during the Wray-era of the FBI to shield from view politically sensitive cases inside the bureau's case management system known as Sentinel. That left only certain officials aware of their existence, often in hidden files in secure storage areas known as sensitive compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs.
Patel has assigned a small team of agents to hunt for the files and uncover abuses, and he has been assisted greatly by a handful of senior executives who can navigate and find well-hidden evidence in the bureau's storage system. They are still digging.
The Plasmic Echo investigation, which centered on whether Trump illegally took classified documents to Mar-a-Lago, has already produced one of the most damning revelations in the entire review. FBI agents themselves did not believe they had probable cause for the August 2022 raid, and they said so in writing.
[We] continue to pass versions back and forth after our pause and concern about [probable cause] for any of the locations outlined… What is the guidance for continuing to work on this document without any new information?
That is an FBI agent asking superiors what to do next, not because new evidence emerged, but because no evidence existed. They raided Mar-a-Lago anyway. The FBI admitted it likely lacked probable cause to raid President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach in 2022. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said he personally approved the decision to seek that search warrant.
Let that sink in. The top law enforcement officer in the United States approved a raid on a former president's home that his own agents had flagged as lacking legal justification. An unidentified lawyer who reviewed the situation put it plainly to Axios:
If I ever pulled a stunt like that, I wouldn't – and shouldn't – have a license to practice law. I'm as shocked as Susie.
That quote refers to Susie Wiles, whose phone the FBI allegedly wiretapped under the claim that her defense lawyer consented to monitoring. Her lawyer has issued a statement adamantly denying he ever gave that consent, raising the possibility that false representations were made to a court.
The Round River investigation may prove the most troubling of all the counterintelligence probes, though at present it remains mostly classified. Agents only recently discovered the opening memo and files for the probe, which was started in the bureau's Pittsburgh field office by targeting Trump lawyer and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his efforts to investigate Hunter Biden's and Joe Biden's exploits in Ukraine, but it then expanded to look at numerous public figures who spoke out about Biden family corruption concerns.
Early whistleblower evidence from that case has raised grave concerns inside Congress about potential civil liberty violations, specifically that people in that investigation may have been targeted solely by virtue of their speech. Reporters, lawmakers, filmmakers, and lawyers who made certain allegations or raised questions about the Bidens' dealings in Ukraine may have been assessed as national security threats aligned with Russia, and treated as purveyors of disinformation interfering in elections.
Read that carefully. The federal government may have opened counterintelligence cases against Americans not for what they did, but for what they said. Speech that contradicted the preferred political narrative was categorized as a national security threat. The First Amendment did not appear to slow anyone down.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has been central to surfacing these abuses, and his own letters from 2022 appear to have flagged the Round River operation before it was even named publicly. He wrote at the time:
The information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI's receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI's false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation. The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter.
And then more directly:
Based on allegations, verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation.
The FBI was not just ignoring evidence of Biden family corruption. According to whistleblowers, it was actively relabeling that evidence as Russian disinformation, then using that relabeling to justify opening counterintelligence investigations against the people who found and reported it. The feedback loop is complete: find the evidence, call the evidence disinformation, investigate the people who found it as foreign agents.
This is not merely a congressional oversight exercise anymore. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon told Just the News that federal and local officials involved in the prosecutions of President Donald Trump may face legal action if the Department of Justice identifies a conspiracy to deprive him or his followers of his civil rights.
The Department of Justice is at the heart of considering these issues right now, so I can't really talk about the specifics, but in general terms, yes, the Civil Rights Division and the DOJ generally does have the tool of a criminal conspiracy statute for conspiracy against rights. And this dates back to the start of the Ku Klux Klan.
The historical reference is pointed. That statute was designed to reach corrupt officials who hid behind government authority to destroy citizens' rights. Dhillon made clear that state-level actors are not shielded either:
I would say all of those things are on the table for lawyers and DOJ officials and others who conspired with them at the state level, state prosecutors, state police and so forth, who conspired to violate civil rights, and it could also include executive branch officials from the first administration who knowingly conspired and orchestrated a violation of federal civil rights.
Federal prosecutors in Miami, led by U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, are investigating the weaponization of intelligence and law enforcement against Trump and his allies as they build a potential grand conspiracy case spanning 2016, 2020, and 2024. According to sources familiar with the probe, the first decisions on whether indictments are warranted could come within weeks.
What the record now shows is a federal law enforcement apparatus that turned its post-9/11 counterterrorism and counterintelligence machinery, built to stop foreign enemies, against American citizens whose political speech was deemed inconvenient. At least 1,200 people who fall into categories of special circumstances targets, including politicians, journalists, religious leaders, and lawyers with constitutionally protected privileges, were investigated under FBI assessments between 2018 and 2024 alone.
The files were hidden. The targets were buried in prohibited access designations. Whistleblowers were silenced, or they fled to Congress for protection. The man now leading the cleanup, Kash Patel, himself had his phone records obtained by the bureau he now runs.
The bureau just lost the man who produced much of the most explosive evidence to Congress over the last 14 months, Congressional Affairs Office Chief Marshall Yates, who was widely popular on Capitol Hill for achieving a level of transparency after years of stonewalled congressional requests, and who announced he was stepping down. The work continues, but the exits are always faster than the arrivals in Washington.
The two middle investigations, Round River and Plasmic Echo, remain largely classified. What has already surfaced is enough. The question now is not whether the FBI was weaponized. The record answers that. The question is who gave the orders, who signed the warrants they knew were flawed, and who decided that a political opponent's supporters were national security threats simply for asking questions the government did not want asked.
Accountability has a long way to travel. But for the first time, it is moving in the right direction.
