ACLJ Sues the FBI To Expose Its Lies and Spying on Kash Patel and Susie Wiles

News just broke that Jack Smith’s Arctic Frost operation spied on the text messages of 44 Members of Congress, bypassing DOJ safeguards in what may be one of the most shockingly unconstitutional violations of the separation of powers we’ve ever seen.

But this isn’t new to the ACLJ. We just filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit over how Jack Smith and Arctic Frost spied on FBI Director Kash Patel and former White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

The FBI subpoenaed the phone records of Kash Patel and Susie Wiles in 2022 and 2023 – while both were private citizens – as part of Jack Smith’s federal probe into President Trump.

Patel is now the FBI Director. Wiles is now the White House Chief of Staff. But at the time, they were simply two private citizens who worked for President Trump, and the Biden Administration treated them as targets.

Let that sink in.

The Bureau that Kash Patel now leads secretly obtained his own phone records just a few years ago. The people running the federal government’s most powerful investigative agency were surveilling the very man who would later be entrusted with cleaning house. If they were willing to do that to him, imagine what they were willing to do to ordinary Americans with far less power to fight back.

And this wasn’t an isolated incident. It was part of the sprawling Arctic Frost scandal – the Deep State’s effort to weaponize federal law enforcement against President Trump and anyone associated with him.

We already knew Jack Smith’s team had surveilled phone records among multiple sitting U.S. Senators and their staff in this same witch hunt. At that time, the ACLJ responded by filing FOIA requests backed by those targeted Senators, followed by a federal lawsuit. Now we know the reach went even further, pulling in text messages, phone records, toll records, subpoenas, and, disturbingly, a recorded phone call between Wiles and her attorney.

Now we’ve learned just how far it went. In addition to Patel and Wiles, Senator Chuck Grassley (IA) recently revealed that he had received records from the DOJ confirming that Jack Smith’s investigative team reviewed the contents of text messages sent by 44 Members of Congress – Grassley says he was one of them.

That revelation is damning enough on its own. But it becomes even more serious when measured against Smith’s own sworn testimony. During his House Judiciary deposition last December, Smith was asked directly: “Did the records that you requested from the Member of Congress include the content of text messages?” He denied it under oath.

However, the records that Grassley obtained from the DOJ say otherwise. If that’s accurate, it means Smith didn’t just weaponize federal surveillance power against sitting Members of Congress – he may have misled Congress about it while under oath.

The Bureau didn’t just monitor political opponents – it appears to have crossed fundamental legal and ethical lines to do it. Reports indicate the resulting files were tucked away in folders labeled “Prohibited,” a strong signal that someone knew exactly how damaging this information would be and tried to bury it before it could trigger scrutiny.

We first learned months ago that Smith’s team had issued subpoenas to Patel’s and Wiles’ wireless carriers. On March 6, the ACLJ filed a FOIA request demanding the records showing who authorized those subpoenas, the legal basis used to justify them, the investigative purpose behind them, and any related surveillance or internal communications. We wanted the truth, in writing, from the agency itself.

The response was silence. So we did what we always do when a federal agency stonewalls the law: We took it to court to force the FBI to comply with its legal obligations and hand over these records. The Bureau will have roughly a month to respond.

Accountability has to be enforced, for Kash Patel, for Susie Wiles, for the 44 Members of Congress swept up in the same dragnet, and for every American whose privacy this Bureau was willing to violate. The ACLJ will keep pressing this case in court, and we’ll keep you posted on every development.

Take action with the ACLJ. Sign the petition: End FBI Corruption. Stop Spying on Americans.