The Biden administrations Department of Justice secretly subpoenaed the phone records of now-FBI Director Kash Patel and now-White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles while both were private citizens, raising fresh concerns about political weaponization of federal law enforcement.
According to The Post Millennial, the records were obtained in 2022 and 2023 as part of Special Counsel Jack Smiths investigation into President Donald Trumps post-2020 election actions and his handling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, as reported by Fox News. Smith ultimately charged Trump in 2023 with multiple felony counts, only to see those cases dropped after Trumps re-election in 2024.
The subpoenas, issued under Joe Bidens watch, targeted two close Trump allies at a time when the administration was aggressively pursuing its chief political rival. Reuters reported that the FBI later discovered the phone records in files that had been labeled prohibited, a designation that effectively shielded them from normal oversight.
At least 10 current FBI employees were dismissed after it emerged that Patel and Wiles had been secretly targeted in this manner. Patel has since said the FBI recently ended the practice of allowing certain files to be categorized as prohibited, a quiet reform that underscores how such labels can be abused.
Patel condemned the operation in a statement to Fox News, declaring that the fact this occurred was "outrageous and deeply alarming. He elaborated, "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," a charge that will likely intensify conservative calls to rein in an increasingly unaccountable security state.
Login