The Biden FBI secretly recorded a phone call between Susie Wiles and her own attorney.
Now a 30-year FBI Academy veteran is raising a question that makes the whole operation look criminal.
And it all comes down to what Jack Smith's agents told the judge who signed off on it.
How Jack Smith's Team Secretly Surveilled Susie Wiles and 21 Trump Allies
Rob Chadwick spent thirty years in law enforcement, including a stint as head of tactical training at the FBI Academy in Quantico – which means he knows exactly what proper procedure looks like.
He says what Jack Smith's team did in the Plasmic Echo probe – the classified-documents investigation targeting Donald Trump – "falls outside of the normal scope," not because the surveillance tools themselves were illegal, but because the targets were a presidential campaign team, not street criminals or terrorism suspects.
"This is the highest level of government in the United States, highest level of trust, of course, and levels of sensitivity," Chadwick told Just the News. "It doesn't get any more sensitive than that."
Newly declassified memos released by the White House Government Transparency Task Force show Smith's team used a pen register on Susie Wiles' phone from February to May 2023 – a government surveillance tool that records who you called, when you called, and how long the conversation lasted, but never the actual words spoken.
Wiles was Trump's campaign co-manager at the time and is now the White House Chief of Staff.
The device logged contacts with 21 individuals: Trump-affiliated lawyers, campaign staff, political advisers, and journalists including Just the News founder John Solomon.
Agents used a technique FBI insiders call "tickle the wire" – contacting Wiles directly, then monitoring her phone traffic to map who she called immediately afterward.
"On 10 April 2023, FBI WFO reviewed WILES's telephonic activity to determine contacts of interest on the date of her FBI interview," one internal memo reads.
Jack Smith's agents weren't investigating a crime – they were mapping the legal defense network of a presidential campaign.
Agents also sent preservation requests for Wiles' email accounts to Google, Microsoft, MSN, and Yahoo.
Then the FBI recorded a phone call between Wiles and her own attorney – without telling Wiles.
Her lawyer has since denied consenting to any such recording, telling Fox News he would have lost his license over that stunt.
Chadwick's central question is whether agents gave the issuing judge the full picture before he approved the pen register order – specifically, what they told him about the targets, and what they left out.
"What was told, and what may have been withheld? That's the real question. How forthright were the affiants when they applied for that pen register on these most sensitive of individuals?"
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Chadwick also flagged something he called "curious" – a break from a basic FBI rule that every agent learns on day one.
The U.S. Attorney's Justice Manual requires agents to record all interviews using Form 302 summaries.
When Smith's team met former CIA Director John Brennan at CIA headquarters in November 2023, they produced 302s that referenced attached handwritten notes.
The attached notes were empty – just a date, a location, Brennan's name, and the names of who else was in the room – and FBI agents don't fill out a cover page for notes they never took.
Jack Smith later told Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley he never met Brennan and had not received any consultation or counsel from the former CIA director while serving as special counsel.
Grassley called that answer "highly evasive and misleading, at minimum," because the records show Smith's team was at CIA headquarters with Brennan in November 2023 – specifically to discuss expert testimony in the classified-documents case.
Jim Jordan referred Smith to the DOJ for criminal prosecution in July, citing evidence that Smith made false statements to Congress about the scope of his surveillance operation.
Jordan documented that Smith's team accessed the text messages of 44 Republican lawmakers – something Smith denied under oath.
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Jack Smith didn't stumble into this – he built a system, and the Biden Justice Department built it with him.
Smith used the lowest available legal threshold to run his operation. A pen register requires only that the information be "relevant" to a case – no probable cause, no showing of criminal activity – which is how a special counsel ends up monitoring the phone calls of a presidential campaign manager, Republican senators, and their lawyers at the same time.
When FBI agents internally objected before the Mar-a-Lago raid that they lacked probable cause for the search, the Biden Justice Department overrode them and ordered the raid anyway.
Smith's team tracked Susie Wiles' calls in real time, monitored Republican senators, and left the notes from a CIA meeting with John Brennan completely blank – then went to Congress and testified about it under oath.
Rob Chadwick spent thirty years in law enforcement training agents on exactly these rules – and he is now asking publicly whether Jack Smith was honest with the judge who signed off on all of it.
Sources:
- Amanda Head, "Veteran FBI training official says agents acted outside of norms in Jack Smith probe," Just the News, October 7, 2026.
- Staff, "Jack Smith team tracked Trump defense lawyers' calls by monitoring his chief of staff's phone," Just the News, October 5, 2026.
- Kaelan Deese, "Jim Jordan urges criminal charges against Jack Smith over alleged perjury," Washington Examiner, July 22, 2026.
- Emma Colton, "Susie Wiles' lawyer denies approving FBI recording, says he'd lose license over 'stunt'," Fox News, February 2026.
- Mary Margaret Olohan, "Jack Smith's team sought records of about one-fifth of Senate Republicans, new documents show," Daily Signal, 2026.
