From at least February through May of 2023, agents working for Jack Smith kept a running log of Susie Wiles’s phone. Who called. Whom she called back. How long it lasted, down to the second. She was not a witness in a back room. She was the co-manager of the campaign of the man the special counsel was already investigating, named to that job in November 2022, the same month Smith took the file. The memos came out Monday. They read like a stakeout.
What a pen register is
A pen register, paired with a trap-and-trace, is the machine that writes down the outside of the envelope. It records the numbers dialed from a line, the numbers that dial in, the time, and the duration. On a modern phone it catches the same facts for texts: who, when, how long. It does not record the words. A wiretap is a different order, a higher bar, a judge persuaded there is probable cause of a specific crime. A pen register is the cheap door. The statute asks a court whether the information is likely to be relevant to an ongoing investigation. Relevance is not guilt. It is not even a strong suspicion about the person whose name is on the bill.
The Supreme Court decided in 1979 that the numbers you dial are not private in the constitutional sense, because you have already handed them to the phone company. Congress later required an order anyway. The order is routine. Prosecutors get them in drug cases and fraud cases to see who is talking to whom before they know what is being said. In the right file it is a tool. On the phone of the opposing campaign manager it is a map.
What they wrote down
The probe was code-named Plasmic Echo. It was the classified-documents investigation that produced the search of Mar-a-Lago, and Smith inherited it. The memos, declassified and released by a White House task force, show the Washington field office reviewing the register on Wiles’s number as a live feed, not a stack of old bills.
On March 24, 2023, an agent wrote that the office was “continuing to review” the device and had just watched a call. A lawyer, redacted as Lawyer 7, called Wiles at 2:04 in the afternoon and talked for forty-one seconds. The same lawyer had called at 2:10 on March 21. She called him back at 2:59 that day and talked for a minute and thirty-four seconds. The agent noted those were the only contacts between the two since the device went on. A late-February note logged an ABC reporter calling her at 8:48 in the morning for two minutes and thirty-six seconds, and called the rest of the day nothing significant. On April 7 agents interviewed her. On April 10 they went back to the register to see whom she had called on the day of the interview.
The sweep, across those months, caught at least twenty-one lawyers affiliated with Trump, campaign staff, political advisers, and at least five journalists. Most names are blacked out. Two are not: Kash Patel, now the director of the bureau, and John Solomon. Outlets in the contact list include CNN, the Washington Post, and Politico. The log also marks calls from a line the bureau labeled the former president’s vanity number, and a first call to the main line of a law firm. Email-preservation demands went to the big providers in February 2023. None of the released pages shows the content of a call. The pages did not need it.
lol… and they wonder why nobody trusts the FBI. Catherine Herridge just put out the declassified memos, and Jack Smith’s team ran a pen register on Susie Wiles’ phone while she was running Trump’s campaign, tracking her calls with nearly two dozen defense attorneys, five journalists, and political advisers, and according to Herridge the list even includes the First Lady and Kash Patel. The paper trail goes all the way up too, with Wray asking Lisa Monaco to sign off on a sensitive investigative matter and Monaco passing it along with a little note… “Merrick, I recommend you approve.”
Let me explain what that means. You don’t watch who the defense lawyers are calling unless you already decided the verdict and were just building the road to it, and a former senior FBI agent calls this a classic “tickle the wire” operation, interview Wiles and then watch who she calls next. Then John Brennan sits down with FBI and special counsel people at CIA headquarters to talk about expert testimony for the trial… and the FBI record of that meeting is blank. How does that happen by accident?
None of this surprises me one bit, but it should make your blood boil, because if they did this to a former president and his lawyers, what do you think they would do to you?
@FBIDirectorKash your name is in these files too… open every one of them and put the people who signed off in front of a grand jury.
— Joe Oltmann (@Joeoltmann) October 5, 2026
Why the map is the abuse
A campaign manager’s phone is the switchboard of a candidacy. Donors, reporters, the candidate, the lawyers hired to answer the prosecutor who is building the case. Smith’s team was not tapping a bookie. It was sitting on the line of the woman running the rival campaign, in the middle of the race, and writing down every lawyer who touched it.
Twenty-one lawyers is not a coincidence of social life. It is the defense. Attorney-client privilege covers the words. It does not, in the government’s view, cover the fact of the call. So the prosecutor who is charging the candidate gets a diary of which lawyer called the campaign chief, on which day, for how many seconds, and whether she called back. That is enough to know who has been retained, who is active this week, and who went quiet after the interview. A defense lawyer who believes the other side can see his incoming calls stops making them, or makes them from a booth. That is the chill. It does not require a recording.
The journalists are the second injury. Five of them, at least, reduced to a duration and a clock time in an FBI memo, because they called the campaign. A reporter who rings the manager of the candidate under investigation is doing the job. The register made the job a line item in Plasmic Echo.
The timing answers the excuse. Wiles was named co-manager in November 2022, when Trump announced. The register was running the following spring, deep into the campaign, months after the search of the club, while Smith’s office was deciding what to charge and whom to put on a witness list. An interview on April 7, a fresh pull of the log on April 10. They were not reconstructing an old conspiracy. They were watching the campaign in the week they sat her down.
Smith has said politics did not touch his investigations, and that the office followed the rules. The rules are the problem. A relevance order is easy to get, and a campaign manager in the orbit of a documents case can be called relevant by a prosecutor who wants the orbit. The same office collected toll records on Republican members of Congress. The same bureau had already subpoenaed the toll records of Wiles and Patel in 2022 and 2023, while both were private citizens. The pen register is the part they watched live.
What it was for
A pen register does not play the tape, because there is no tape. It tells you the shape of a person’s week. In this file the week belonged to the woman running the campaign of the defendant. The government learned which of his lawyers called her, how long they stayed on, and which reporters were in the rotation, and it learned it while the race was on. That is not a search for a classified document. That is a seat at the switchboard of the other side. The words were never the point. The list was.