Good question. And the next question gets even more troublesome: why did the FBI try to hide the investigation?
We’ll get to the real buried lede in a moment, but first, we need to set the context. Reuters broke the news yesterday afternoon that Merrick Garland’s Department of Justice and Christopher Wray’s FBI had conducted surveillance on Kash Patel and Susie Wiles in 2022 and 2023. The surveillance took place as part of Jack Smith’s investigation into the alleged mishandling of classified material at Mar-a-Lago. No one can explain why that would necessitate surveilling Patel and Wiles, however, and Patel claims that the FBI tried to bury the records of that surveillance before he took over the bureau:
The FBI subpoenaed records of phone calls made by Kash Patel and Susie Wiles, now the FBI director and White House Chief of Staff, when they were both private citizens in 2022 and 2023 during the federal probe of Donald Trump, Patel told Reuters on Wednesday.
Reuters is the first to report on the FBI’s actions that took place during the Biden administration, largely when Special Counsel Jack Smith was investigating whether Trump had interfered with the 2020 election and had hidden classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, according to Patel. Smith was appointed to take over that probe in November 2022. …
“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,” Patel said in a statement to Reuters.
Reuters could not independently verify many of the details about Patel’s claims, including the full extent and timing of the seizure of phone records and the motive for doing so. Patel said the records were filed in a way that made it difficult for him and other FBI leaders to find them after taking over the bureau in February 2025.
That has already prompted a reaction from Patel. He fired ten agents for their participation in this investigation, the New York Times reports, calling it “a rolling barrage of retribution”:
About 10 F.B.I. employees, some veteran agents, were dismissed this week for their work on the investigation into President Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his residence in Florida, according to five people with knowledge of the move.
The firings are part of a rolling barrage of retribution aimed at those who worked on the two federal prosecutions of Mr. Trump after his first term in office. They came hours after Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, told Reuters that as part of the documents inquiry, the bureau had subpoenaed phone metadata for himself and Susie Wiles, currently the White House chief of staff.
They are not expected to be the last, those people said.
Perhaps this is just a rolling collection of consequences. The entire probe of Trump by the Biden-era DoJ smelled of political retribution, but at least there was an issue with Trump and his retention of documents at Mar-a-Lago. What issue existed for a probe of Patel and especially Wiles, either with the classified-material probe or Smith’s connected probe into the January 6 riots? The FBI does not get to surveil any US person it wants, regardless of whether the investigation relates to criminal or intelligence interests.
This looks a lot like a White House and DoJ keeping tabs on its political opponents in a manner that makes Watergate look like a bungled game of telephone. Anyone participating in that kind of political surveillance deserves to get fired. Six Democrats, including Senator Mark Kelly, felt free to lecture members of America’s armed forces on the legal risks of following illegal orders. That applies to the DoJ as well, and if agents did try to hide those records as Patel alleges, they damned well knew it, too.
And then there’s the biggest question in this story, which is the FBI’s wiretap on a call between Susie Wiles and her attorney. According to Reuters, the FBI colluded with Wiles’ attorney without her knowledge to surveil her and interfere with her constitutional rights to effective legal representation:
In 2023, the FBI recorded a phone call between Wiles and her attorney, according to two FBI officials. Wiles’ attorney was aware that the call was being recorded, and consented to it, but Susie Wiles was not.
What in the actual f*** is this? Since when does law enforcement get to wiretap calls between a target and their legal representation? The only circumstance in which this would pass constitutional muster is if the attorney was also suspected of criminal or espionage activity. Otherwise, this is a violation of Wiles’ black-letter constitutional rights and outrageous conduct on the part of her attorney. And that may well be another reason that the Garland DoJ tried to bury the evidence of the surveillance on Wiles and Patel.
Hugh Hewitt is aghast:
Licensed since 1983. I haven’t heard of a breach of atty ethics remotely as serious as this appears to be, but perhaps Florida law allows a lawyer to entrap a client without the client’s consent —b/c who knows what a client is going to say, whether serious or in jest. Just wow. https://t.co/aV97JmIAgV
— Hugh Hewitt (@hughhewitt) February 26, 2026
So is John Hinderaker:
Hugh is being charitable. It is inconceivable to me that any lawyer would permit the FBI, or anyone else, to record an attorney-client conversation without the knowledge of his client. That is a grotesque betrayal of a lawyer’s most basic duty, and it is hard to imagine how a lawyer who did such a thing could keep his license.
It is almost impossible to fathom how deep the corruption ran during the Joe Biden/Merrick Garland years.
It’s not as if this is the first indication that Garland and Biden ran a political-surveillance op through Smith, either. The FBI tracked phone records of sitting Senate Republicans as part of Smith’s J6 probe, which came out last fall in the middle of the Schumer Shutdown. The GOP demanded retribution at that time for Smith’s spying, but nothing came of it in the end. The Protection Racket Media ignored the story entirely. Ted Cruz called Operation Arctic Frost “the Biden DoJ’s Watergate” at that time, and for good reason, but it has now gotten worse with these new revelations.
Wiles, now Donald Trump’s chief of staff, told people around her, “I am in shock.” She’s in need of a better attorney, to be sure. We are in need of a full investigation into Merrick Garland’s activities as Attorney General and Christopher Wray’s involvement in them as FBI Director, too. Time to shake the ice off Operation Arctic Frost and get to the bottom of this massive scandal.
Editor’s Note: The Protection Racket Media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about President Trump, his administration, and conservatives.
Help us continue to expose their left-wing bias by reading news you can trust. Join Hot Air VIP and use promo code FIGHT to get 60% off your membership!
