Jack Smith spent years chasing Donald Trump through the courts. Most Americans figured they already knew how far that hunt went.
But a fresh stack of government files tells a much uglier story. And the targets reach well past the President himself.
Now the paperwork shows exactly who else the FBI had in its sights. One name on that list will make every parent in America furious.
Inside the Secret Probe Called “Plasmic Echo”
The White House Government Transparency Task Force released a batch of internal FBI documents in early October 2026, and the New York Post combed through them.
According to those files, the FBI tracked the travel of Melania Trump and her son, Barron Trump, while agents worked out the best moment to search Mar-a-Lago in the summer of 2022.
Barron was a teenager at the time. The bureau’s own planning notes refer to him as the “minor son.”
One item on an FBI to-do list from late May 2022 reads: “Finalize FBI understanding of FPOTUS/FLOTUS/minor son’s travel (type of aircraft and specific timeline).” Agents wanted the type of aircraft and the exact schedule. That is a level of detail most families would expect a stalker to want, not their own government.
Another document laid out the timing plainly: “Any search warrants would be served after the former President departs Mar a Lago.”
The bureau ran all of this under a secret investigation it named “Plasmic Echo.” Somebody at the FBI apparently thought that sounded impressive.
And the files show the FBI didn’t stop with the Trump family’s flight plans.
Christopher Wray Saw the Danger and Pushed Ahead Anyway
In May 2022, then-FBI Director Christopher Wray sent a memo to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland. Wray warned that the investigation could sweep in top figures from Trump’s first administration and that it “could potentially be disruptive to the democratic process if publicly disclosed prior to an election.”
Read that one more time. The man running the FBI put in writing that the probe could disrupt an American election.
Then he scribbled a note at the bottom of the same memo: “Merrick, I recomend you approve. CW.” Garland signed off, according to the Post.
A month before the raid, one FBI special agent, whose name the documents redact, raised doubts about whether the bureau even had legal authority to search the former President’s office or bedroom. The agent suggested more conversations with Trump’s lawyers first.
The FBI went in anyway. On August 8, 2022, agents searched Trump’s office and the bedrooms of both Donald and Melania Trump.
But the most revealing part of the story came after the raid, when the bureau turned its attention to Susie Wiles.
Wiles ran Trump’s political operation back then as he geared up for the 2024 race. She now serves as White House Chief of Staff. Between February and May 2023, FBI agents tracked her phone activity to watch her contact with Trump’s defense attorneys. The logs cover calls with nearly two dozen lawyers connected to Trump, along with campaign aides, political advisers, and even journalists.
The documents redact nearly every identity in those logs. One name slipped through: Kash Patel, who now runs the FBI and held no government job at the time.
Agents even logged Wiles’ calls with Trump himself. One entry from May 19, 2023 reads: “2:05 pm The FPOTUS Vanity Number called WILES for 16 minutes and 11 seconds.” On March 9, 2023 alone, the bureau recorded 39 calls on her line.
Wiles sat down with FBI agents for an interview in Jacksonville, Florida in April 2023. Afterward, the bureau’s Washington Field Office combed through her phone activity from the day of that interview. Agents noted she spoke with Trump and several of his lawyers, and took calls from a Washington Post reporter and Politico’s Florida bureau chief. An earlier FBI note flagged a call from an ABC News reporter.
Jack Smith’s Machine Was Built to Reach the Whole Movement
None of this happened in a vacuum. Merrick Garland handpicked Jack Smith to run both the classified documents investigation and the January 6 investigation. Smith then raced to put Trump on trial before the 2024 election, steering the January 6 case into a Washington, DC courtroom where a Republican defendant could hardly hope for a friendly jury.
Smith brought baggage to the job, too. His career includes high-profile corruption prosecutions that higher courts later tore apart, the kind of record critics point to as a pattern of prosecutorial overreach.
And a federal judge threw out the documents case entirely in July 2024 after finding that Garland had unlawfully appointed Smith in the first place. So the FBI tracked a teenager’s travel and mapped a campaign operation’s phone traffic in service of a prosecution that never had a lawful prosecutor at the helm.
Look at who turned up in the Wiles logs. Campaign staff. Political advisers. Defense lawyers. Reporters from ABC News, the Washington Post, and Politico. Tracking that phone gave investigators a running map of how Trump’s entire political operation worked, who it talked to, and when.
That’s the part that ought to bother even folks who can’t stand Donald Trump. A special counsel investigating one man ended up with a window into an opposition campaign and its conversations with the press. Free speech and a free press don’t mean much if a reporter’s phone call to a campaign official lands in an FBI memo.
Conservatives have warned for years that surveillance powers never stay pointed where Washington promises. They drift toward whoever the people in charge happen to dislike. Every fight over FISA reauthorization and every argument against blanket government data collection comes back to that same worry. Here sits a documented case of the bureau watching the phone of the woman running the leading opposition campaign.
Maybe somebody inside the bureau will argue each step followed proper procedure. Perhaps a court approved some of it. The files leave plenty of questions unanswered on that front, and the redactions don’t help. But “we filled out the right forms” is cold comfort when the forms themselves admitted the whole thing could upend an election.
White House spokesperson Lauren Bis didn’t mince words. “Jack Smith’s surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power,” Bis said. “Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple. Those responsible must be held accountable.”
The Questions Washington Still Hasn’t Answered
The redacted names matter. Somebody wrote that to-do list about Barron Trump’s flights. Somebody decided a campaign manager’s call log deserved daily review. Somebody read the warning about disrupting the democratic process and kept going.
And the Americans who lived through the COVID years, when federal agencies leaned on Big Tech to silence dissent, already have a pretty good idea how far these institutions will go when they decide someone poses a threat.
The real test now falls on the people who hold the keys to the rest of the files. More documents almost certainly exist. If the bureau tracked a former First Lady and her son to plan a raid, nobody should assume the paper trail ends with this release.
But one thing already seems settled. The permanent bureaucracy in Washington didn’t just investigate a former President. It studied his family’s movements and mapped his political team’s every phone call, all while its own director admitted in writing what kind of damage that could do.
Sources: New York Post, “Biden FBI tracked Melania and Barron Trump’s travel, and even tapped Susie Wiles phone, documents show,” by Emily Goodin and Josh Christenson, October 5, 2026; White House Government Transparency Task Force document release, October 2026.