The FBI seized phone records belonging to its current director, Kash Patel, back in 2022 during the Biden Administration, when he held no government position and carried no official authority. The bureau also swept up the phone records of now-White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles in 2023. Two sources confirmed the surveillance to Just The News on Wednesday.
Both subpoenas were issued as part of the investigation into President Donald Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. In other words, the FBI used a probe targeting the president to quietly vacuum up the private communications metadata of two people in his orbit who would go on to hold senior positions in his administration.
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.
Consider the mechanics of what happened here. The FBI identified a private citizen, one who happened to be a vocal critic of the bureau's conduct and a close ally of the man it was investigating, and obtained his phone records through a subpoena process that, according to Patel, was deliberately hidden from oversight. This wasn't a search warrant served in broad daylight. It was a quiet pull of records buried in case files that Patel says were "designed to evade all oversight."
That phrase deserves weight. If accurate, it means the previous FBI leadership didn't just surveil Trump associates. It structured the paperwork to ensure nobody outside the investigation would know it had done so.
Susie Wiles received similar treatment a year later, in 2023, when she, too, was a private citizen working in Trump's political orbit. The pattern is not subtle. The investigative apparatus reached beyond its stated target and into the private lives of the people around him.
For years, conservatives have argued that federal law enforcement was weaponized against Trump and his allies. For years, legacy media treated that claim as paranoid overreach. Every new revelation narrows the distance between the accusation and the evidence.
The classified documents case itself was ultimately derailed by significant legal questions about the special counsel's authority. But long before that outcome, the investigation served as a vehicle for something broader: the collection of private communications data from people whose only apparent connection was political loyalty to a man the FBI was targeting.
That is not how investigations are supposed to work in a free country. Subpoena power exists to gather evidence of criminal conduct, not to map the social and communications networks of a political movement's key figures. When the target is a former president, and the collateral subjects are his closest advisors, the burden on the bureau to justify its reach should be extraordinary. Instead, according to Patel, the process was hidden.
The sources who confirmed the subpoenas to Just The News remain unnamed, and the specific officials who approved the records requests have not been publicly identified beyond "previous FBI leadership." That gap matters. Accountability requires names, not institutional abstractions.
Someone signed off on obtaining a private citizen's phone records. Someone decided Kash Patel's communications were relevant enough to subpoena and sensitive enough to bury. Someone made the same calculation about Susie Wiles a year later. Those decisions didn't make themselves.
There is a deep irony in the fact that Kash Patel now runs the very agency that surveilled him. He arrived at the FBI with a mandate to reform an institution that conservatives have long viewed as culturally hostile to their movement. This revelation gives that mandate concrete, personal stakes.
Patel isn't operating on theory. He is sitting in the director's chair of an agency that, three years ago, was pulling his phone records in secret. Every internal memo he reads, every oversight mechanism he evaluates, every personnel decision he makes now carries the weight of firsthand knowledge about what the bureau is capable of doing when left unchecked.
Critics will argue that a director who was personally targeted cannot be objective. The better question is whether an agency that targeted him was ever objective to begin with.
The immediate question is transparency. If the FBI buried these subpoenas in case files designed to avoid oversight, those files presumably still exist. The current leadership has every reason and every authority to surface them, identify who authorized the requests, and determine whether the legal predicates were as "flimsy" as Patel describes.
The broader question is harder. Federal agencies possess enormous power to obtain private communications data, often with minimal judicial scrutiny and virtually no public accountability. When that power is aimed at political figures and their associates under the cover of an investigation that itself collapsed under legal challenge, the entire framework deserves reexamination.
The FBI obtained the phone records of two people who now hold two of the most powerful positions in the federal government. It did so when they were private citizens. It did so in secret. And if not for sources willing to talk, the public might never have known.
That is not oversight. That is not accountability. That is power exercised in the dark, which is exactly the kind of power that invites abuse.
