Phone records belonging to FBI Director Kash Patel and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles were subpoenaed by the bureau back in 2022 and 2023 as part of a “massive targeting operation” undertaken by the Biden administration, The Post has learned.
The subpoenas were issued when both Patel and Wiles were private citizens, as special counsel Jack Smith probed President Trump’s handling of classified documents and his alleged efforts to interfere in the 2020 presidential election.
An FBI official told The Post that the information was contained in files found at the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, DC — similar to the “Arctic Frost” disclosures unearthed from apparent burn bags last year.
The FBI logo at the entrance to the J. Edgar Hoover Building, home to the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington, D.C., United States, on May 28, 2025. NurPhoto via Getty Images
FBI Director Kash Patel, joined at left by Attorney General Pam Bondi, appears before reporters at Justice Dept., Friday, Feb. 6, 2026, in Washington. AP“It’s not just phone records and subpoenas — but a massive targeting operation,” the official noted, indicating the use of both technical tools and human intelligence. Several FBI employees were fired Wednesday related to the discovery.
The existence of the subpoenas was first reported by Reuters.
Patel and Wiles’ phone records were found in files labeled, “Prohibited,” according to the outlet.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles attends the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace at the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace on February 19, 2026 in Washington, DC. Getty Images“It is outrageous and deeply alarming that the previous FBI leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records — along with those of now White House chief of staff Susie Wiles — using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight,” Patel said in a statement.
The FBI director noted that he recently barred bureau employees from labeling files “Prohibited.”
Purported “burn bags” related to the “Crossfire Hurricane” probe – the FBI’s investigation into alleged links between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia – were also discovered by the bureau last year.
In official parlance, “burn bags” refers to containers that hold sensitive documents that are meant to be destroyed after a certain period of time.
