Jack Smith Spied on Trump's Lawyers and Advisors to Find Out Who They Were Talking to In Response to Their Prosecution

They slapped Trump with an absurd investigation, and then essentially criminalized his use of lawyers to defend himself. They spied on his lawyers and advisors as if they were mafia capos.

Jack Smith team tracked Trump defense lawyers' calls by monitoring his chief of staff's phone

Declassified memos reveal that Jack Smith's secret dragnet, codenamed "Plasmic Echo," monitored senior Trump associates and staff's contacts with lawyers, staff, and journalists during the 2024 campaign.

By John Solomon and Steven Richards

Already in the crosshairs for spying on Congress, ex-prosecutor Jack Smith and his team monitored the activities of President Donald Trump's legal defense team, journalists and campaign advisers using a pen register device that tracked the calls coming to and from his chief of staff Susie Wiles' phone, according to newly declassified memos that reveal some of the FBI's invasive tactics used to target Trump.

Just the News reported last week that Smith obtained the phone records of several senators through a subpoena and secured a non-disclosure order from the court preventing the mobile carrier from notifying the lawmakers affected. One of those senators, Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., filed a lawsuit against Smith arguing his spying constituted an unauthorized intrusion into her civil rights.

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The three-year probe of the ex-president -- which put Joe Biden's administration in charge of the legal fate of his GOP rival in the 2024 election -- was approved at the highest levels of the Biden Justice Department, including by Attorney General Merrick Garland, Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco and FBI Director Christopher Wray, the memos show.

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The probe also made FBI agents at times uncomfortable, with a senior official at the bureau's Washington, D.C. Field Office (WFO) counterintelligence unit and his team raising concerns that they did not have a justification to raid Trump's Florida home and wanted to use a less invasive solution than a search warrant, the documents show.

"WFO does not believe (and has articulated to DOJ CES), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant at Mar-a-Lago. DOJ has opined that they do, requesting a wide scope including residence, office, storage space," one Assistant Special Agent in Charge wrote in a July 13, 2023, update on the Plasmic Echo probe.

In that same memo, the agent laid out alternative methods for resolution, rather than executing a search warrant on Mar-a-Lago, President Trump's Palm Beach, Florida estate, including by asking "to speak with" the former president and his counsel directly.

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The newly released memos show an intense focus on two constitutionally protected activities -- Trump's right to a legal defense and the normal activities of a presidential campaign. After the Justice Department and the FBI began their investigations into the then-former president, Trump announced his third campaign for the Oval Office in November 2022 and appointed Wiles to serve as co-campaign manager.

The memos released Monday by the White House show that FBI investigators were tracing Wiles' phone calls and text messages with at least 21 lawyers affiliated with Trump, numerous campaign staff, political advisors, and at least five journalists from at least February to May 2023.

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In one instance, the FBI specifically targeted Wiles' communication records to understand who she was in contact with before and after her interview with FBI agents on April 7, 2023, in Jacksonville, Florida. "On 10 April 2023, WFO [redacted] reviewed WILES's telephonic activity to determine contacts of interest on the date of her FBI interview," one memo reads.

The records also show agents combed through entire filings of Trump's political action committee with its donors and campaign expenses, set up a social media monitoring effort and even used personal political endorsements as leverage against a key witness.

Jack Smith was asked at his recent Senate perjury session if being a Republican was illegal in his eyes.

Here's one of the predicates for that question: Smith's team treated a Trump National Security Advisor's endorsement of Republicans as an avenue for criminal investigation.

One memo recounts how the FBI sought to pressure former Trump National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien when he was declining to volunteer for an interview by checking his political endorsements of candidates.

"I'm going through all of it, and it looks like O'Brien is active in endorsing Republican candidates," one member of Jack Smith's team wrote on February 6, 2023. "Can FBI please look at his social media and see if there's anything of relevance we would want to ask him about? Has he endorsed Trump again? Thanks."

Jack Smith secretly met with the criminal architect of RussiaGate -- and the FBI left blank the pages that were supposed to document this meeting.

"On 3 November 2023, FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) and Special Counsel personnel met with former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) John BRENNAN at CIA Headquarters in McLean, Virginia," a typed FBI summary of the meeting states.

"The purpose of the meeting was to discuss expert testimony to National Defense Information in the forthcoming captioned investigation," the summary written five days after the Brennan interaction added. "No documents were shown in this meeting. The original Agent notes will be maintained in the attached IA."

Two agents' notes are attached to the memo, but they are entirely blank except for the date of the meeting, the location, Brennan's name and the government attendees.

posted by Disinformation Expert Ace at 02:35 PM

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