Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! I am hotel-blogging this morning, and it is not going well. When we arrived in San Antonio from Florida yesterday, we discovered the hotel has no keys. None. It’s some kind of IT problem. So to get in the room, the gym, or the business center, we must stop at the front desk and ask for a person to take us. (The hotel staff is very nice about it. This stopped helping after the fifth visit.) I get it; this is a very first-world problem. But the short version is: this morning’s roundup is on the short side. Today we tackle yesterday’s biggest story, which burst onto social media and has kept the stage: new documents disclosing Biden’s FBI surveillance of Suzie Wiles, Barron, Melania, and the President himself.
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In March, 2022, Director Christopher Wray sent a personal memo to then-AG Merrick Garland, asking the Attorney General to authorize “Plasmic Echo”— the hyper-secret classified-documents probe and Mar-a-Lago raid. Wray specifically warned Garland in the memo that the investigation could rope in top figures from the previous administration and, in a spasm of wild understatement, warned it “could potentially be disruptive to the democratic process if publicly disclosed prior to an election.” If anybody finds out. The New York Post reported, “Biden FBI tracked Melania and Barron Trump’s travel — and even tapped Susie Wiles phone, documents show.”
The two-page memo’s stated purpose burst with important-sounding acronyms, purportedly “To obtain (Garland’s) signature authorizing the Washington Field Office (WFO) to open a full sensitive investigative matter (SIM).” So… a WFO-SIM. (It’s like a code language. Sometimes I think they do this on purpose so nobody else has any idea what they’re talking about.)
Anyway, at the very end, well below Wray’s eye-popping warning about potentially disrupting the nation’s democratic process, Wray clumsily scrawled, “Merrick, I recommend you approve. CW.” Garland obediently signed off. (Technically, he didn’t actually sign. He initialed off.)
Wray’s poor penmanship aside, we can relish what this shows about the fantastic levels of butt-covering CYA between the two men. I would bet Michelle’s Tahoe that Garland insisted Wray add his handwritten recommendation. I’m not going down for this alone. Obviously, Wray was already implicitly recommending Merrick’s signature, just by sending the form to him in the first place— the extra annotation was unnecessary, except to prove Wray was on board in case this ever blew up.
But anyway, there it was, a minor but embarrassingly obvious annotation, evidence in chicken scratch that the men knew full well just how awful this would look if it was ever “publicly disclosed.” As it just was.
🔥 Plasmic Echo was the real name of the FBI investigation, even though it sounds like it should be a neon-colored energy drink, or maybe a description of an mind-blowing noise Chris Wray remembered from his last mushroom trip. Dude— it was like a plasmic echo, dude.
While planning the agency’s August 2022 Mar-a-Lago search, which was the first-in-history criminal raid of a former president’s residence, FBI personnel listed among their to-do’s: “Finalize FBI understanding of FPOTUS/FLOTUS/minor son’s travel (type of aircraft and specific timeline).” Translation: agents wanted the movements of Trump, Melania, and Barron so they could time the raid. So they were tracking Trump’s teenage son like he was an unidentified orb flying over a military base.
Now we are learning these boring mechanical details, which describe the careful planning of an unprecedented, arguably treasonous raid as though it were any routine FBI operation, rather than an event that knocked the nation off its axis. That was one thing. But then there were the phone logs.
🔥 From February through May 2023, the FBI had what it calls “pen registers” tapping the phones used by Trump, Melania, Barron, and, in particular, of Susie Wiles, who then ran Trump’s campaign, and now is his chief of staff. A pen register isn’t technically a wiretap— it doesn’t record what anybody says, just who called whom and for how long, down to the second.
It’s the difference between a burglar who steals your diary and a burglar who stands outside your house with a clipboard, noting that you arrived at 6:00, left at 6:10, and spent 6 minutes and 50 seconds talking to someone identified as Lawyer 12. (The FBI numbered 21 different Trump lawyers like they were deli customers.)
They only used pen registers because the threshold for approving that kind of subpoena is lower than for an outright wiretap. They didn’t have to come up with any evidence Suzie Wiles had committed any kind of crime, for example.
But altogether, reading the FBI’s logs, you finally reach the same inescapable conclusion that Wray’s agents must have: Susie Wiles is the hardest-working person in Washington.
FBI analysts logged her making or receiving a call roughly every ten minutes, all day, for months. For example, agents logged 39 calls on March 9, 2023 alone, including three in 22 minutes that evening (39 seconds, 49 seconds, 56 seconds). At 8:10, for example, the log noted: “The FPOTUS Vanity Number called WILES for 4 minutes and 1 second.” (Good thing they clarified that extra second. You never know when that kind of data will prove to be critical in an investigation.)
In short, Suzie Wiles kept her cell phone so busy that it needed a tiny little chief of staff of its own.
🔥 Here’s one example of a bit of a report emailed to FBI officials on March 10, 2023, about who the Trump people were talking to. (The annotation is from the terrific Catherine Herridge, who’s been on the story like glue.)
“The FPOTUS Vanity Number” referred to President Trump, who called Suzie from some phone number that spells a word. The unredacted files didn’t disclose which word —my leading theory is 1-800-FBI-SUCKS— but the DOJ, for its own reasons, redacted the fun part.
Even though pen registers don’t allow listening in on the conversational contents, a caller’s connections and the timing of calls to particular people tells the FBI a lot. For example, the records showed agents were highly interested in everyone Wiles spoke to just before and right after her FBI interview.
How this information was related to whether Trump kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago is anyone’s guess.
🔥 The pen register logs swept up hundreds of contacts, including a dozen Senators and at least five journalists from ABC, CNN, the Washington Post, Politico, and Just the News. Don’t misunderstand that the Biden FBI carefully numbered everybody Wiles and Trump spoke to avoid the appearance of making an enemies list. No, they ID’d them all. They made the list, all right. The people’s names were just redacted by Trump’s DOJ in the declassified version. (Only two proper names were left unredacted: Kash Patel and Just the News founder John Solomon.)
This is where some delicious irony trickles in. John Solomon now chairs the White House Government Transparency Task Force— the same team that just declassified these memos and released them yesterday. So the very same man leading the team publishing the phone logs was in the phone logs, having been put on a Biden enemies list by the FBI— for taking calls from a campaign manager.
Sadly, when it comes to Plasmic Echo, corporate media has become blind as Wuhan bats. They are meticulously ignoring the whole story. Sure, they went wild when Trump kicked CNN out of the White House press pool, and filled their front pages with indignant stories predicting the imminent death of democracy from press intimidation. You remember. It literally just happened last week.
But now? When they discover that Biden’s FBI was making careful lists of reporters who had called the ‘wrong’ people, logged down to the exact second— well, corporate media’s response is to suddenly remember a Botox appointment. The sounds of silence.
🔥 One obvious historical comparison is jumping up and down like an eager fourth grader raising his hand to be called on. Remember Watergate?
In 1972, five amateur ‘burglars’ tied to Nixon’s reelection campaign broke into the Democrat Party’s hotel-room headquarters, and the press treated it as the story of the century— two years of front-page headlines, hearings, an honorable president forced to resign in disgrace. The press still gives itself awards for that coverage.
Yesterday, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) called the Plasmic Echo files “objectively a bigger scandal than Watergate.”
He’s not wrong. It’s not just a few blundering campaign burglars this time, but the FBI itself, weaponized against a rival campaign’s lawyers, logging all its calls, including with journalists, and obsessing over a 16-year-old’s travel itinerary. (Not to mention shamefully rummaging through the First Lady’s intimates, without legal authority, looking for “classified documents.” Gross.)
Is this the new normal? Will Democrats now accept the FBI spying on Gavin Newsom’s 2028 presidential campaign? That sounds like an ironic rhetorical question, but Democrats face a stark choice. If they don’t condemn this, how can they later complain when Trump’s DOJ does the same thing? (Well, they can still complain; but their complaints will lack any force. Just as their complaints about Trump’s revenge tour getting nowhere.)
Democrats moved the goalposts during the Trump lawfare. Now they can’t put them back.
🔥 As of this morning, the story is being carried only by the New York Post, Fox News, the Examiner, the Daily Signal, and the reporter whose own calls got logged (Solomon). Only in conservative media, in other words. Meanwhile, the prize-winning corporate media platforms that turned Watergate into a national epic with gripping Hollywood dramas and a display case stuffed with glistening Pulitzers have, so far, found more pressing matters to report on. (Maybe they’re waiting for the movie version; but who will play Kash Patel?)
Last week, special prosecutor Jack Smith —the public face of Plasmic Echo (how about Steve Buscemi for Smith?)— testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee, insisting, “I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalty.” Uh huh. But the ‘nonpartisan’ case Smith built from the raid and all this cell phone surveillance was tossed out in July 2024 by Southern District Judge Aileen Cannon, who ruled Smith was unlawfully appointed.
In other words, legally speaking, Smith’s job never existed.
So here’s what the nation has to show for it all: a legally nonexistent, allegedly nonpartisan prosecutor, running a secret political probe —a probe that the FBI Director who requested it said threatened to disrupt democracy during an election— approved by a CYA-laden memo, which tracked a teenager’s flights, compiled lists of reporters and Biden enemies, and logged a campaign manager’s calls down to the second— and the same press that took Nixon down like a pack of rabid zombies over a single bungled break-in is covering Plasmic Echo with less enthusiasm than it would report a Trump bathroom visit.
Neither the timing nor the slow trickle are accidental. This latest weaponization scandal was released now, a month from the midterms, for some reason. And the methodical way they are releasing documents has some purpose, too. We don’t know the plan, but we have learned enough to know there is a plan. It’s all headed somewhere.
Have a terrific Tuesday! Come back tomorrow morning, as we dig into a new roundup of essential news and commentary but, fair warning, I will be airplane blogging. In other words, results may vary. Now I need to get them to let me back in the room.
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Therefore, take up the full armor of God, so that you will be able to resist in the evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm.
— Ephesians 6:13 LSB
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My father did not fight the enemy on Italian farmland, earn medals of honor, and come home with shrapnel in his leg and images of horror seared forever in his mind so that America can burn to ashes in the fires of socialism and Islam.
Pray.
Speak out.
Vote.
Save America.
You’ve got to hand it to the communists. As it is throughout history they are willing to do anything, trample any law, and any right an individual has to take down their opponents. Their hatred for the restrictions the constitution puts on them is palpable.