Then-FBI Director Christopher Wray asked Attorney General Merrick Garland in March 2022 for authorization to open a case as a full “Sensitive Investigative Matter.” Newly declassified records document that request.
The FBI gave the case the code name “Plasmic Echo.”
Agents set out to examine how Donald Trump handled classified government records after he left the presidency. Special counsel Jack Smith later took over the investigation.
The White House released the files Monday as part of a larger document disclosure.
According to the records, senior leaders at both the Justice Department and the FBI approved the probe.
The documents also capture friction behind the scenes.
Officials at the FBI’s Washington Field Office questioned whether investigators had gathered enough probable cause to support a search warrant.
Justice Department prosecutors kept the case moving while those questions circulated.
By the spring of 2022, planners were working through logistics. An internal FBI email thread dated June 1, 2022, addressed when agents would act.
“Any search warrants would be served after the former President departs Mar a Lago,” the document stated.
A separate internal planning document handed investigators another assignment. It told them to “finalize FBI understanding of FPOTUS/FLOTUS/minor son’s travel (type of aircraft and specific timeline).”
That wording covered Trump, his wife Melania and their son Barron. Barron Trump was still a minor at the time.
Agents carried out the search of Mar-a-Lago on Aug. 8, 2022. They went through Trump’s office, storage spaces and other locations the warrant named.
The team left with thousands of government records. More than 100 of those documents bore classification markings.
The newly public files then turn to Susie Wiles. She was one of Trump’s most influential political advisers in 2023. She now serves as his White House chief of staff.
Between February and May 2023, investigators placed a pen register and related monitoring tools on a phone tied to Wiles. The tools logged her calls and other communications over those months.
The data included incoming and outgoing calls, missed calls, text-message metadata and voicemail activity.
Her contacts during that stretch included defense attorneys, campaign advisers, Trump Organization personnel, political operatives and journalists.
The records indicate that investigators gathered information about the communications themselves. They did not collect what people said in the conversations.
The monitoring overlapped with Wiles’ own sessions with Smith’s prosecutors and FBI agents. One of those interviews took place in Jacksonville, Florida, in April 2023.
The White House condemned the tactics as it released the documents. Spokesperson Lauren Bis addressed the matter in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“Jack Smith’s surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power. Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple,” Bis told Fox News Digital. “Those responsible must be held accountable.”
The release lands while Smith’s methods draw fresh attention in Washington. Separate revelations about his election-related investigation, known as Arctic Frost, sparked the renewed scrutiny.
Arctic Frost involved the collection of phone-record information connected to Republican lawmakers. Plasmic Echo was a different case.
Taken together, the Plasmic Echo files show that agents tracked the movements of Melania and Barron Trump as part of operational planning for the Mar-a-Lago search.
They also show that investigators collected metadata on Wiles’ communications while they worked through the legal and political circle around Trump.
