The FBI secretly subpoenaed the phone records of Kash Patel and Susie Wiles in 2022 and 2023, when both were private citizens, as part of the federal investigation into then-former President Donald Trump.
Fox News confirmed the subpoenas this week, and the revelation landed alongside another significant development: at least 10 FBI employees were fired Wednesday.
Patel, now the FBI director, called the surveillance of his own records and those of the current White House chief of staff what it plainly was.
"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."
That last detail matters. The phone records were reportedly found in files labeled "Prohibited," a classification category that Patel has since eliminated at the Bureau.
The designation existed, in practice, as a way to shield sensitive case materials from internal review. In other words, the FBI didn't just collect the records. It hid them.
The subpoenas were issued as part of special counsel Jack Smith's sprawling investigation into Trump's efforts to challenge the results of the 2020 election and his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Smith charged Trump in 2023 with multiple felony offenses. Trump denied wrongdoing in both matters.
But the reach of this investigation extended well beyond Trump himself. Patel and Wiles were private citizens at the time their records were seized. Neither was charged with any crime. And in 2023, according to two FBI officials, Bureau agents recorded a phone call between Wiles and her attorney.
Read that again. The FBI recorded a call between a private citizen and her lawyer.
Smith, for his part, testified last year that call records helped investigators verify the timeline of events surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
He told a House panel, as reported by Reuters, that the records obtained from lawmakers did not include the content of conversations. He maintained that his team "followed all legal requirements in getting those records."
Following the legal minimum is not the same as acting with restraint. A process can be technically lawful and still represent a breathtaking abuse of institutional power.
The question was never whether the FBI had the procedural authority to issue subpoenas. The question is whether a federal law enforcement agency should be vacuuming up the phone records of political associates, future administration officials, and attorney-client communications in an investigation that ultimately produced no convictions and was voluntarily abandoned.
The cases Smith built did not survive contact with political reality or legal scrutiny. After Trump's re-election, Smith moved to drop the election interference case, citing a Justice Department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
A federal judge dismissed it. Smith also dropped the DOJ's appeal of a separate ruling that had already dismissed the classified documents case.
So the investigation that justified seizing Patel's and Wiles's phone records, that justified recording a call between Wiles and her attorney, that justified burying all of it in files designed to evade oversight, ended with the special counsel walking away from both cases.
The damage, of course, was already done. The records were already collected. The call was already recorded. The precedent was already set.
The revelation about the subpoenas arrived the same day Patel moved to fire at least 10 FBI employees. The FBI Agents Association condemned the terminations:
"The FBIAA condemns today's unlawful termination of FBI Special Agents, which — like other firings by Director Patel — violates the due process rights of those who risk their lives to protect our country."
The association further argued that the firings "weaken the Bureau by stripping away critical expertise and destabilizing the workforce." The names of those fired were not released, reportedly due to privacy reasons.
The FBIAA's framing is predictable. Every institutional reform gets cast as an attack on the institution itself. Every personnel action becomes a threat to national security. This is the bureaucratic immune response: any attempt to hold the Bureau accountable triggers warnings that accountability will get people killed.
But accountability is exactly what the phone records story demands. An FBI that secretly subpoenas the records of political figures, records attorney-client phone calls, and then buries the evidence in files specifically designed to block oversight is not an institution that earns deference when its leadership is restructured. It is an institution that explains why the restructuring was necessary.
This is not the first time the FBI has been caught using its surveillance authorities to reach into the political sphere surrounding Trump. It is simply the latest confirmation. Each revelation follows the same arc:
At some point, the pattern itself becomes the story. The FBI did not stumble into surveilling the future director and the future White House chief of staff. It chose to. And it chose to hide what it found.
Patel's decision to eliminate the "Prohibited" file designation is a small but telling reform. If the Bureau's work is lawful and justified, it should survive sunlight. The fact that a classification existed whose primary function was to prevent internal review tells you everything about the culture that produced these subpoenas.
The people who built that culture are not victims of reform. They are the reason it exists.
