The FBI raided and ransacked Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago home in August 2022.
Now White House declassified the internal memos from that operation – and the targeting went far beyond Donald Trump.
Biden's FBI spent months before that raid tracking Trump's own family – and one name at the very top approved it.
Merrick Garland Personally Approved Jack Smith's Mar-a-Lago Surveillance Operation
Newly declassified memos from Operation Plasmic Echo – the FBI's codename for its Trump classified documents investigation – show agents deployed a pen register device to record every outgoing call from White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles' phone.
They also deployed a trap-and-trace device to capture every incoming number.
Agents sent detailed reports tracking when Trump's defense lawyers tried to reach Wiles, whether calls were missed or returned, how long each conversation ran, and even when one lawyer called while Wiles was already on the line with someone else.
FBI agents also tracked when the First Lady called Wiles, which device she used to make the call, and the exact duration of every conversation.
Before the August 8, 2022 raid on Mar-a-Lago, a task list assigned to Washington Field Office agents shows they were directed to finalize their understanding of Melania and Barron Trump's travel plans – including which type of aircraft they would use.
Biden's FBI was tracking which aircraft a sixteen-year-old boy would fly before raiding his home.
This wasn't rogue agents going off-script.
On March 24, 2022, FBI Director Christopher Wray sent a memo to Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco requesting formal approval to investigate Trump's own campaign team.
Monaco initialed it and wrote directly to Merrick Garland: "Merrick, I recommend you approve, Lisa 3/25/22."
Garland approved.
"Jack Smith's surveillance operation was a disgraceful abuse of government power," spokeswoman Lauren Bis told The Epoch Times. "Spying on political opponents is weaponization of law enforcement, plain and simple."
FBI Agents Said There Was No Probable Cause for the Mar-a-Lago Raid
A July 13, 2022 internal memo – written one month before the raid – shows Washington Field Office agents told DOJ leadership they didn't have enough evidence to justify a search warrant.
The agents reported in writing that they had not established probable cause for a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago — and had already told DOJ the same.
The agents went further, pointing out that five weeks of effort fixated on building probable cause had been "counterproductive" if the real goal was recovering sensitive documents quickly.
DOJ overruled them, ordered the raid anyway, and the entire case eventually collapsed — a federal judge ruled that Jack Smith's appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional and dismissed the charges against Trump.
Smith dropped what remained of his prosecution after Trump won the 2024 election.
Not one of the 337 documents cited in the case resulted in a conviction.
At least ten FBI employees have since been fired for their roles in the operation.
Operation Plasmic Echo Went All the Way to the Attorney General
Nixon's men broke into the DNC's offices at the Watergate complex and planted listening devices in the phones.
Garland's FBI ran a federal surveillance operation against a presidential campaign's leadership and then authorized a raid after its own field agents warned them in writing that they had no probable cause to do it.
The Federalist called it a high-tech Watergate but worse, and the memos prove it.
In Watergate, a handful of operatives went rogue outside of government authority.
Here, the attorney general of the United States personally signed the authorization.
The memos weren't buried by accident either.
Records of Wiles' surveillance were filed under a "Prohibited" classification in the FBI's case management system – a designation that makes files nearly invisible during standard oversight reviews.
That's not sloppy record-keeping — that's deliberate concealment.
Garland is out of office, Wray is gone, and Smith walked away from what remained of his case once Trump won reelection — none of them facing a single charge for what those memos document.
The question is whether the people who tracked a teenage boy's travel plans and wiretapped the First Lady's calls get to walk away clean, or whether someone in Washington finally decides to find out who else knew.
Sources:
- Jill McLaughlin, "FBI Tracked Trump Aide's Phone, Monitored Melania Trump Before Mar-a-Lago Raid: Declassified Memos," The Epoch Times, October 6, 2026.
- Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell, "FBI Recorded Susie Wiles Phone Call With Lawyer Without Her Knowledge, Per Reports," The Daily Signal, February 26, 2026.
- "Biden FBI Recording Trump Campaign Calls Is A High-Tech Watergate But Worse," The Federalist, February 26, 2026.
- "The Latest FBI Spying Makes Watergate Look Trivial," The Federalist, October 13, 2025.
- Emma Colton, "Susie Wiles' Lawyer Denies Approving FBI Recording, Says He'd Lose License Over 'Stunt'," Fox News, February 27, 2026.