The latest chapter in the long saga of government surveillance surrounding President Donald Trump may also be the most brazen.
According to recent reporting, in 2022 and 2023 the FBI under the Biden administration obtained the phone records of Kash Patel, who is now director of the FBI, and Susie Wiles, who serves as White House chief of staff. At the time, Patel was acting as Trump’s representative in dealings with the National Archives and Records Administration, while Wiles was managing Trump’s presidential campaign.
In one instance, the FBI secretly recorded a conversation between Wiles and her attorney. That category of communication sits at the very core of legal protection in the American system. Attorney-client privilege exists so that individuals can seek legal advice without fear that the government is listening.
In any previous era of American journalism, a story like that would have dominated front pages for months. Instead it barely registered.
I noted in late February that the episode would likely disappear from the news cycle within a week. That prediction turned out to be too optimistic. Most of legacy media did not cover the story at all.
That indifference is disturbing on its own. What makes it worse is that there is now nearly a decade of precedent for it. The reported surveillance of Wiles and Patel is simply the newest entry in a pattern that stretches back to the beginning of Trump’s political rise.
Nine years ago this week, President Trump posted his now infamous tweet claiming that the Obama administration had spied on his campaign. The response from the political establishment was immediate and dismissive, with intelligence officials, the media, and Democrats all mocking the claim as paranoid fantasy.
At the time, the public knew little about the emerging Russiagate narrative, and the same institutions that mocked Trump were already laying the groundwork for the appointment of a special counsel whose investigation would hang over his presidency for years.
As events would later show, Trump was correct.
His campaign had indeed been infiltrated and surveilled by elements of the federal government. Inspector general reports, court filings, and reporting by independent media outlets such as The Federalist eventually confirmed that the surveillance had been carried out using false statements, withheld evidence, and unlawful investigative tactics.
Even more remarkable is that the spying never truly stopped. The fundamental problem is that it has been known for nearly a decade that these abuses occurred, yet no one has paid a price.
The Beginning
Shortly after Carter Page was publicly identified as a foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign in March 2016, the FBI began targeting him. Within months, the bureau sought and obtained the infamous Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance warrants against him. Those warrants were granted after the FBI filed affidavits claiming that Page was an agent of Russia, despite having no evidence to support that claim.
Years later, the Justice Department’s own inspector general concluded that the FBI had obtained those warrants through a series of false statements and omissions. Key evidence and exculpatory information were withheld from the court. In one instance an FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, falsified an email used in the application in order to ensure the court would grant the surveillance warrant.
Another Trump campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos, faced a different approach. Rather than formal surveillance, the FBI deployed a network of individuals posing as friendly contacts. Among them was “Azra Turk,” a fabricated identity used by an undercover operative posing as an academic staffer. Others included Stefan Halper, who approached Papadopoulos under the pretext of working on an academic paper, and Jeff Wiseman, a former friend of Papadopoulos who was hired by the FBI while steering conversations toward topics that might produce incriminating statements.
Sam Clovis, who oversaw the campaign’s foreign policy team, was also targeted by Halper, who was being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars through Defense Department contracts. Later reports from a whistleblower alleged that FBI Director James Comey inserted two honeypots into the Trump campaign, though little is publicly known about this claim, reflecting the broader lack of accountability surrounding these operations.
Another figure caught up in the dragnet was Sergei Millian. Millian’s only connection to Trump was that he had once worked as a real estate broker selling condominiums. Yet he was falsely portrayed as a key source for the Steele dossier, the infamous smear concocted by the Clinton campaign.
Years later Millian, an American citizen who had no involvement in the dossier or the allegations surrounding it, received notices from Google indicating that his communications had been obtained by the government. Why someone targeted by the Clinton campaign would also be targeted by the federal government has never been explained, and once again no one has been held accountable.
At the same time, despite the CIA being barred from involvement in domestic political matters, CIA Director John Brennan created a “fusion cell” to gather intelligence that produced the false claim that Putin wanted Trump elected.
These early efforts saw the government’s intelligence apparatus deployed against a presidential campaign to gather information on its strategy and any potential October surprises, a focus that included specific lines of inquiry pursued by Halper.
That alone should have been one of the defining scandals of modern American politics.
After the Election
Trump’s victory in November 2016 did not bring the surveillance efforts to a halt. Instead they intensified.
Comey arranged a private meeting with the president-elect at Trump Tower in January 2017. The official purpose of the meeting was to brief Trump on the existence of the Steele dossier. The real purpose, as Comey later admitted, was to observe Trump’s reaction. What he did not tell Trump at the time was that the dossier had been fabricated out of whole cloth by a Washington-based operative working for the Clinton campaign. At the time of the briefing, the FBI already knew the identity of the individual in question, Igor Danchenko, and would have been aware that Danchenko had previously been the subject of counterespionage investigations.
The same period also saw the targeting of General Michael Flynn.
Flynn’s phone conversations with the Russian ambassador were monitored, leaked to the press, and falsely described in ways that suggested Flynn had lied about the conversations.
In reality Flynn had done nothing wrong. The case against him ultimately collapsed, but not before he lost his home, his job, and his reputation.
Meanwhile, anti-Trump officials within the government were leaking transcripts of Trump’s own phone conversations with foreign leaders to the press. The sources of those leaks were never publicly identified and no one was ever prosecuted.
Impeachment and Aftermath
The pattern continued throughout Trump’s first term.
Trump’s July 2019 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was monitored by the intelligence apparatus. A distorted account of the call was then transmitted to Democratic members of Congress and used as the foundation for Trump’s first impeachment.
Once again, the individuals responsible for leaking a presidential communication faced no consequences.
After the events of Jan. 6, 2021, the surveillance net widened even further.
Federal authorities reportedly obtained large sets of financial data in an attempt to identify individuals who might have supported the protest. Banks were asked to search and filter certain transactions, including purchases at Dick’s Sporting Goods, Cabela’s, and Bass Pro Shops, as well as payments containing particular keywords such as “MAGA” and “Trump.”
Another investigation, known as Arctic Frost, involved clandestine surveillance targeting a number of Republican members of Congress over alleged “election conspiracy” activity. Arctic Frost later evolved into the elector case brought against Trump by Special Counsel Jack Smith. Much of the evidence from that and other corrupt investigations was placed in the FBI’s “prohibited access” system, where it could not be queried. Instead of flagging the materials as restricted, the system would indicate that they did not exist at all. The mechanism was specifically designed to conceal abuses and prevent oversight.
Longtime Trump aide Dan Scavino and adviser Michael Caputo received notices from Google informing them that their communications had been obtained by the government. Scavino was monitored from 2021 through 2024, including up to three weeks before Trump’s second inauguration. Caputo says the FBI continued secretly monitoring him for more than four and a half years, with the surveillance extending into 2025 and including both his emails and phone communications. He has also stated that agents shadowed him at his home and even at his church.
To this day there has been no explanation for why the FBI targeted these Trump confidants, and no one has been held accountable.
All of this forms the backdrop to the latest revelations involving Kash Patel and Susie Wiles.
The monitoring of their communications fits squarely within the pattern that has defined the past decade. Political figures associated with Trump are targeted, and when the truth eventually emerges the story quickly fades without consequences.
The Price of Impunity
The common thread running through all of these episodes is impunity.
Comey was fired but never held accountable. The FBI lawyer who falsified evidence in the Page warrant application received a slap on the wrist from James Boasberg, the same judge who is now working hard to derail Trump’s second term. Officials who unmasked Flynn and others have suffered no repercussions. Whoever leaked Flynn’s intercepted conversations to the media was never identified. The leakers responsible for exposing classified presidential communications were never found. Halper collected his government payments and quietly retired. Smith has faced no consequences.
Across a decade and multiple administrations, not a single senior official has faced criminal accountability, or in many cases any accountability at all.
That absence of consequences explains why the pattern continues. Institutions rarely restrain themselves when there is no penalty for abuse. Boundaries that once seemed unthinkable gradually become routine.
The surveillance of a campaign adviser becomes the surveillance of a president-elect. That becomes the interception of a president’s private conversations. That becomes the monitoring of a chief of staff speaking with her lawyer.
Each step builds on the last.
For nearly a decade, the most powerful investigative tools of the federal government have repeatedly been directed at the same political movement and the same political figure. The public has learned about these episodes one by one, usually long after the fact, and always without accountability.
That is the real story behind the latest revelation involving Patel and Wiles.
A decade after Trump was first targeted, the country is still waiting for the institutions responsible for these abuses to face consequences. Until that happens, there is little reason to believe the pattern will stop.
Hans Mahncke is in-house counsel at a global business advisory firm. He holds LL.B., LL.M. and Ph.D. degrees in law.
