The surveillance, which was approved by Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, led attorney Alan Dershowitz to warn of ethical breaches and violations of the Sixth Amendment. While Senator Mike Lee described the operation as a precedent-setting scandal, the White House countered that surveillance footage of a Trump aide moving storage boxes resolved earlier legal doubts about probable cause for the 2022 search of the former president's residence. The records also show FBI officials were occasionally kept unaware that their investigative targets included members of Congress.
Tuesday, October 20, 2026
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Jack Smith Team Concealed Lawyer Targets in Phone Monitoring Orders
US Politics9 days ago
The head of the FBI's Washington Field Office repeatedly resisted demands from the Department of Justice to raid Mar-a-Lago, according to records released by a White House transparency task force. The documents further reveal that investigators led by former special counsel Jack Smith obtained judicial approval to monitor the phone of former campaign manager Susie Wiles by concealing from the court that defense attorneys were targeted. Using a tool called a pen register, agents under the "Plasmic Echo" probe tracked the phone routing data of 21 lawyers, 5 journalists, and political aides, including Kash Patel, from February to May 2023.
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