Declassified FBI Logs Plasmic Echo Tracked Wiles Phone
by: Marcus Webb

Declassified FBI Logs Show Plasmic Echo Tracked Wiles’s Phone Contacts

WASHINGTON — The FBI logged the phone contacts of Susie Wiles, now White House chief of staff, for at least three months in 2023 as part of its investigation into President Trump’s handling of classified records, according to FBI records released Monday by a White House task force. The records log calls between Wiles and at least 21 lawyers, along with campaign aides and journalists. They also log calls from a number the bureau labeled the “FPOTUS Vanity Number.”

The nine documents carry stamps showing they were declassified or approved for public release by Counsel to the President Scharf on Sept. 29. The White House Government Transparency Task Force released them, The Daily Signal and yourNEWS reported. Just the News, the outlet founded by John Solomon, published the files.

The investigation, code-named Plasmic Echo, examined Trump’s retention of classified records after he left office in January 2021. Special counsel Jack Smith took it over in November 2022. The logs come from a pen register and trap-and-trace device, known as a PR/TT. It records which numbers a phone calls and receives, with times and durations, not what is said. None of the released records shows agents capturing the content of calls.

Lawyers, reporters and a campaign, by the minute

The logs were compiled by the FBI’s Washington Field Office and sent to prosecutors on Smith’s team. In the released copies, most names are replaced with numbered labels such as “Lawyer 17,” “Journalist 3” and “Campaign 8.” Lawyer labels run to at least “Lawyer 21.”

A March 10, 2023, email gives what it calls a “chronology of PR/TT contacts of interest” from March 7 to 10. It lists each call to the minute, with notes from an analyst. One note marks the first contact between Wiles and the general line of a law firm. Another marks her first call with a Trump Organization main line. The email records two calls from the “FPOTUS Vanity Number” on March 9.

On March 24, 2023, a field office specialist reported a single 41-second call. “WFO is continuing to review the PR/TT on Wiles’s phone number,” the email says. It notes the caller, identified as Lawyer 7, had contacted her only twice before since monitoring began.

Reporters appear throughout. A Feb. 23, 2023, email from an intelligence analyst reads, in full, that there was nothing significant except that an ABC News reporter had called Wiles for 2 minutes and 36 seconds. The night before, an analyst sorted the day’s contacts into “Pre-Interview,” “During the Interview” and “Post-Interview” sections. They include calls with a New York Times journalist and with Solomon, whose name is not redacted. An Assistant Special Counsel replied, “Gold stars all around.”

An FBI electronic communication dated April 26, 2023, covers April 6 to 8. Smith’s office and the FBI interviewed Wiles in Jacksonville, Fla., on April 7. The FBI then reviewed her phone activity “to determine contacts of interest on the date of her FBI interview,” the record says. It lists calls with reporters from The Washington Post, CNN and Politico. It also lists a call of more than an hour with the law firm Bedell, Dittmar, DeVault, Pillans & Coxe. An analyst’s note in the record says Wiles was represented by two lawyers who attended the interview. A later record covers May 19 to 22.

A 2022 approval and a field office’s objection

Two of the documents predate Smith’s appointment. A March 24, 2022, memorandum from FBI Director Christopher Wray asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to approve opening a full “sensitive investigative matter.” The subject is redacted. yourNEWS described it as the request to open the classified-records investigation. The memo says Justice Department policy required the attorney general’s approval for investigations that could involve a presidential candidate or senior campaign staff. It says the pool of potential subjects “may include” such people. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco wrote “I recommend you approve” on March 28, 2022, and the approval line is signed the same day.

A July 13, 2022, email from an assistant special agent in charge of counterintelligence at the field office sets out the field office’s position before the Aug. 8, 2022, search of Mar-a-Lago. “WFO does not believe (and has articulated to DOJ CES), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant at Mar a Lago,” it says. CES is the department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section. The email says the department wanted a wide scope, including Trump’s residence, office and storage space. It calls five weeks spent on a warrant “counterproductive” if the goal was to recover classified records quickly. It lists other options, including asking to speak to Trump or his counsel.

A separate February 2023 email chain shows a member of Smith’s team asking the FBI to review the social media of a person identified as Ambassador O’Brien. The prosecutor asked, “Has he endorsed Trump again?”

What was already public

The Plasmic Echo code name became public in April 2024 through court filings in Trump’s classified-documents case, CNN reported at the time. A federal judge dismissed that case in July 2024, and Smith dropped his appeal after the 2024 election. In February, FBI Director Kash Patel said the bureau had subpoenaed his and Wiles’s phone records in 2022 and 2023, Fox News and Reuters reported. Monday’s release adds the minute-by-minute logs and the internal emails.

Smith has said politics did not affect his investigations. “Anybody who has worked with me and knows me during the course of my career knows that I would not let politics play a role,” he told senators at an earlier hearing, as quoted by yourNEWS. A pen register requires a court order, but none of the released records includes the order for Wiles’s phone.

The documents were published by Just the News, including the July 2022 field office email, the April 2023 monitoring record and the March 2023 contact chronology.

Sources

Filed under: Federal Bureau of Investigation / White House Counsel

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