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Newly declassified documents released by the White House show the FBI tracked the phone records of Susie Wiles, now White House chief of staff, and monitored the travel of Melania and Barron Trump as part of the classified documents investigation into President Trump.

Getting into it: The records come from “Plasmic Echo,” the investigation into Trump’s handling of classified documents after his first term that was later taken over by special counsel Jack Smith. Between February and May 2023, while Wiles was running Trump’s political operation, the FBI used a pen register, a tool that logs phone numbers, call times and call lengths but not what was said, to track her calls and texts with at least 21 Trump lawyers, campaign advisers, Trump himself and at least five journalists, including reporters from ABC News, The Washington Post and Politico.

Agents also pulled her call logs from the days around her April 2023 sit-down with the FBI. Separately, planning emails from May 2022 show agents worked to “finalize FBI understanding of FPOTUS/FLOTUS/minor son’s travel” so the Mar-a-Lago search could happen after Trump left the estate. The files also show then-FBI Director Christopher Wray recommended the probe to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland with a handwritten note, “Merrick, I recommend you approve,” and that some FBI agents pushed back internally, telling prosecutors they didn’t have enough to justify a search and suggesting a “reasonable conversation” with Trump’s lawyers instead of a raid.

“Jack Smith’s surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power,” White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said. “Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple. Those responsible must be held accountable.”

The documents also show agents were asked to look into which Republican candidates Robert O’Brien, Trump’s former national security adviser, was endorsing and what he was posting online, and that the FBI sat down with John Brennan, the former CIA director, in late 2023 about serving as an expert witness at trial. Agents searched Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 and seized thousands of documents, including more than 100 marked classified. A federal judge threw out the case in July 2024, ruling Smith had been unlawfully appointed, and Smith dropped his other federal case against Trump after the 2024 election.

This all comes days after senators grilled Smith at a Judiciary Committee hearing over how he ran his investigations, including his separate election probe’s collection of phone records from Republican lawmakers, as the Trump administration continues releasing files it says prove the government was “weaponized” against him.