The FBI under former President Joe Biden subpoenaed the phone records of Susie Wiles, now the White House chief of staff, while she was still a private citizen. FBI Director Kash Patel disclosed the surveillance, which Axios reported Thursday, calling it "outrageous and deeply alarming."
Wiles's response was three words: "I am in shock."
According to Newsmax, the subpoenas reportedly sought call records from 2022 and 2023, a period during which the FBI was investigating whether then-former President Donald Trump improperly retained classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. But the scope of what the Bureau did went further than pulling phone logs. According to a Reuters report citing two FBI officials, in 2023, the FBI also recorded a phone call between Wiles and her attorney. Wiles was not informed of the recording.
Patel alleged that previous FBI leadership obtained phone "toll records" under "flimsy pretexts" and then placed the matter in restricted case files to limit oversight. That last detail deserves attention. The records weren't just collected. They were buried.
Restricting case files is a bureaucratic maneuver designed to shrink the circle of people who can review what was done and why. It is the kind of institutional behavior that doesn't happen by accident. Someone made a deliberate decision to ensure that fewer eyes would see what the FBI had done to a private citizen who happened to work in the orbit of a political opponent of the sitting president.
Trump officials familiar with the matter told Axios this is "the tip of the iceberg."
None of this happens in a vacuum. The surveillance of Wiles fits into a longer history of FBI overreach aimed squarely at people connected to Donald Trump, stretching back to the surveillance controversies tied to the 2016 Russia probe. The tools change. The justifications shift. But the target profile stays remarkably consistent: individuals in Trump's political circle, subjected to federal investigative power under circumstances that, once exposed, look far less like law enforcement and far more like political targeting.
The left spent years dismissing Republican accusations that federal agencies had been weaponized as conspiracy theories and partisan grievance. Every new revelation makes that dismissal harder to sustain. It is one thing to argue that an investigation was conducted in good faith when it stays within normal procedural bounds. It is quite another when the Bureau is:
Each of those steps, taken individually, raises questions. Taken together, they describe something that should alarm anyone who cares about the limits of government power, regardless of party.
Recording a call between a citizen and her lawyer is not a minor procedural footnote. Attorney-client privilege exists for a reason. It is one of the oldest protections in American law, and the FBI's decision to record that conversation, without informing Wiles, represents either a stunning lapse in judgment or a conscious choice to disregard a foundational legal boundary.
The same political class that lectures the country about "norms" and "institutional integrity" has been conspicuously quiet about what it means when the nation's premier law enforcement agency records privileged legal communications of a private citizen. Imagine the coverage if the roles were reversed. Imagine the think pieces, the panel discussions, the urgent calls for congressional hearings. Instead, silence.
GOP lawmakers have signaled interest in the revelations, and with Patel now running the Bureau, the restricted case files that shielded these actions from scrutiny are presumably no longer restricted. The question is how deep this goes. If Trump officials are right that Wiles's case is merely the tip of the iceberg, the coming months could produce a steady stream of disclosures about how the Biden-era FBI used its authority against political adversaries.
The American public was told for years that the institutions were functioning properly, that concerns about political surveillance were overblown, that the adults were in charge. Susie Wiles was a private citizen. Her phone records were seized. Her call with her own attorney was recorded. And the whole thing was filed away where no one was supposed to find it. They found it.