Jack Smith’s team won judicial approval to track Susie Wiles’s calls in the classified documents probe while written applications stayed silent on defense lawyers who later appeared in the records, a gap critics call a serious ethics problem.
Unsealed court records show former special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors obtained orders for a pen register and trap-and-trace device on the phone of Susie Wiles, then a top Trump fundraising aide and now White House chief of staff. The written requests, filed in Washington, D.C., federal court in February and April 2023, did not state that the monitoring would sweep up contacts with criminal defense lawyers.
Just the News reported that the devices later captured records of Wiles’s contacts with 21 defense lawyers, journalists, and campaign advisers. The tools record when and where calls are made, who is on the line, and how long they last. They do not capture the contents of conversations.
The applications went to U.S. District Judges Beryl Howell and James Boasberg, both appointed by President Barack Obama. Howell signed the first order the day after prosecutors submitted it. Boasberg approved the extension months later. The classified documents case itself was based in Florida, and the records leave unanswered why Smith’s team filed the surveillance requests in the District of Columbia.
Prosecutors told the court that historical AT&T connection records justified the monitoring. They argued the phone number tied to Wiles had been used to reach subjects and witnesses around the same time those people spoke with the government.
Smith’s application stated:
"Historical telephone connection records provided by AT&T revealed that beginning at least as early as May 2022, the Subject Phone Number was used to communicate with subjects and witnesses shortly before and/or after they spoke with the Government in connection with this criminal investigation,"
Howell’s order tracked the standard finding required for this type of surveillance:
"The Court finds that an attorney for the government [...] has certified that the information likely to be obtained by such an installation and use is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation,"
The filings are heavily redacted. An administration official told Just the News the “Subject Phone Number” belonged to Wiles. At the time, she led Trump’s fundraising operation at SAVE America PAC. The monitoring sat inside Smith’s investigation of allegations that Trump mishandled classified documents.
Nothing in the written applications flagged that the net would pull in defense counsel. That omission is the core of the dispute now taking shape.
Newly released records described by Fox News show the FBI tracked Wiles’s phone metadata from at least February through May 2023 under the Plasmic Echo investigation. The logs cataloged calls with at least 21 attorneys, journalists from CNN, The Washington Post, and Politico, campaign personnel, and Secret Service contacts.
White House officials framed the operation as an abuse of power aimed at a political opponent’s inner circle. Heritage Foundation foreign policy expert Victoria Coates told Fox News Digital the tracking of Wiles was “unprecedented, dangerous and should be illegal.”
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis was blunt:
"Jack Smith’s surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power. Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple,"
The same document set also shows agents gathered details on Melania and Barron Trump’s travel ahead of the August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago, expanding the picture of how far the probe reached into Trump’s orbit.
Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz told Just the News the failure to flag lawyer contacts raises both legal and ethical alarms. Defense counsel, he noted, carry a Sixth Amendment duty to represent their clients. Keeping judges in the dark about that dimension of the surveillance undercuts basic expectations of how the system is supposed to work.
Dershowitz said:
"If they were going after lawyers, lawyers who have a Sixth Amendment obligation to defend their clients, and withholding that information from the courts, that can raise serious not only legal issues but ethical issues as well,"
He pressed the practical harm. A lawyer calling a wiretap expert, a polygraph examiner, or a potential witness does not expect the government to learn that the call happened in real time. Access to those contact patterns can tip investigators to witness lists and defense strategy before the defense is ready to disclose them.
Dershowitz continued:
"Here we have a clear violation of expectations of privacy. When you make a phone call and you're a lawyer, you do not expect the fact that you made that phone call to, say, a wiretap expert or a lie detector expert, or a witness. You don't expect that the government will get access to that, and yet the government has access to who the defense attorneys called,"
That edge, he argued, hands the government a major advantage while the investigation is still secret. The names would surface later in ordinary discovery. They would not have to surface while the tactic was still live.
Howell and Boasberg are not blank-slate jurists in Trump-related matters. Howell, a senior judge in the District of Columbia and former chief judge from 2016 to 2023, has repeatedly ruled against Trump policy directives. She struck down a Trump executive order aimed at the law firm Perkins Coie. In that separate case she wrote that no American president had issued orders like it, and she invoked Shakespeare’s line about killing all the lawyers.
In the classified documents matter, Howell pierced attorney-client privilege between Trump and lawyer Evan Corcoran under the crime-fraud exception. She also enforced Smith’s warrant for Trump’s Twitter account and fined the company $350,000 for slow compliance. She had overseen grand juries tied to the Mueller probe and the 2020 election investigations. The Justice Department once asked her to recuse; she refused.
Boasberg, who previously led the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, approved the April 2023 extension of the Wiles monitoring. In a later case he ruled against the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for deportations, ordered Justice Department officials to explain why planes were not turned around, and found probable cause for criminal contempt, a finding later reined in by an appellate court. Trump publicly branded him a “radical left lunatic” and called for impeachment over that fight.
The White House Government Transparency Task Force, chaired by unpaid special government employee John Solomon while he remains on leave as editor-in-chief of Just the News, made the pen-register applications and orders public this week. The file names include Pacer 26-PR-9999.pdf and a notice of filing.
The Wiles monitoring sits beside a parallel controversy. Last month, similar questions erupted over Smith’s team obtaining long-distance call records and texts of members of Congress. Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., has sued the former special counsel, alleging a violation of her constitutional rights. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan’s panel released a federal agent interview transcript and a report concluding that Smith’s team “ran roughshod” over separation of powers to obtain congressional communications logs.
Smith has testified that he believes he did nothing wrong. He has said he would investigate and prosecute Trump the same way today and has insisted that politics played no role in his decisions.
Pen registers and trap-and-trace orders are easier for the government to obtain than full wiretaps. Prosecutors need only certify that the information is relevant to an ongoing criminal investigation. They do not need the higher showing required to listen to conversations. That lower bar makes disclosure about who will be swept in, especially defense lawyers, more important, not less. Judges cannot weigh privilege and Sixth Amendment risks they are never told about.
The records still leave hard questions open. Why file Florida-case surveillance papers before two D.C. judges known for tough rulings against Trump? Did either judge learn, outside the written applications, that lawyer contacts were a likely result? The public versions remain redacted. Full answers will require more unsealing and more testimony.
Taxpayers fund special counsel offices on the promise of equal justice, not secret maps of who a political opponent’s aides call for legal help. When prosecutors hide that stake from the court, accountability is not optional, it is the whole point.
