The FBI needs a massive fumigation and housecleaning, as more evidence has come to light that the bureau subpoenaed and got phone records on Kash Patel and Susie Wiles.

The news was broken by Reuters, and then quickly confirmed by multiple other outlets. The subpoenaed records were apparently part of Jack Smith’s special counsel investigation, which was eventually shut down and closed up once Trump was reelected. However, the records were concealed so that Patel, even as the new head of the FBI, wouldn’t be able to find them.

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.

“Arctic Frost,” for those who remember, was a huge fishing expedition that led to ridiculous claims by the Biden Justice Department in order to get a hold of phone records of Congressional Republicans, including the asinine claim that then-Speaker Kevin McCarthy was a “flight risk” so the DOJ absolutely HAD to get his phone records. We don’t know for certain if these newly-discovered phone records are part of the “Arctic Frost” insanity, but as you can imagine, Kash Patel is none too happy about what has been found.

In a statement to Fox News Wednesday, Patel called the move to seize the phone records “outrageous and deeply alarming.”

“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,” he said.

The FBI had found the phone records in files labeled as “Prohibited,” Reuters reported.

Patel also said he recently ended the FBI’s ability to categorize files as “Prohibited.”

What was even more mind blowing was the revelation that Susie Wiles’s lawyer KNEW that a phone conversation that they had was being recorded – and agreed to it!

In 2023, the FBI recorded a phone call between Wiles and her attorney, according to two FBI officials. Wiles’ attorney was aware that the call was being recorded, and consented to it, but Susie Wiles was not.

I did not go to law school, but I don’t think this is great lawyering https://t.co/CGdpd91K5Z

— Mary Katharine Ham (@mkhammer) February 26, 2026

It is an open question as to where this conversation took place. For example, Virginia is a one-party consent state. Florida, however, is not. Even if Susie Wiles has no good legal recourse against that lawyer (whom I hope she fired immediately after learning about the recorded conversation), this has to be a massive ethical breach, right? So much for attorney-client privilege!

It may or may not be connected, and Director Patel is not confirming it yet, but at least six FBI agents were shown the door yesterday, with reports that four others were also fired.

The FBI, at the direction of Director Kash Patel, has fired at least a half-dozen agents tied to the 2022 search of President Donald Trump’s home in Florida, six people familiar with the matter told NBC News.

Three of the sources said at least 10 employees overall were dismissed, from support personnel to agents and supervisors.

The FBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In a statement Wednesday, the FBI Agents Association called the dismissals related to Mar-a-Lago a violation of due process.

“The FBIAA condemns today’s unlawful termination of FBI Special Agents, which—like other firings by Director Patel—violates the due process rights of those who risk their lives to protect our country,” the employee group said. “These actions weaken the Bureau by stripping away critical expertise and destabilizing the workforce, undermining trust in leadership and jeopardizing the Bureau’s ability to meet its recruitment goals—ultimately putting the nation at greater risk.”

Is it unlawful if the agents involved are fired for cause? We don’t know that this is the case, but given the news, can the FBI Agents Association assert with complete confidence that the agents who were fired did NOT participate in the subpoena of either Kash Patel’s or Susie Wiles’s phone records, OR the recording of a conversation between Wiles and her lawyer, OR the filing of all this information as “Prohibited” so that it wouldn’t be discovered – or at least have a greater chance of going undetected for a longer period of time? I don’t think that is a safe bet for the FBIAA to make, and they may well end up eating their words later.

However, the New York Times gave the fired FBI employees plenty of sympathy in a highly-biased “news” article as they glossed over the concealment of the information, and tried to explain their theory of why these phone records were subpoenaed in the first place.

Requests for phone records are common in complex criminal investigations to establish timelines and provide proof of communication. It remains unclear if the F.B.I.’s Trump-appointed leaders have accused employees of wrongdoing. In the past, they have not. In some cases, firings have violated procedural safeguards created to protect agents from politically motivated dismissal, according to agents and their lawyers.

The firings are likely to stoke growing resentments against Mr. Patel, a Trump ally seen by many agents as a high-flying neophyte willing to sack rank-and-file employees on a whim, without evidence they did anything wrong, according to current and former officials.

Mr. Patel said that not only did the F.B.I. under the Biden administration request phone toll records for himself and Ms. Wiles, which did not include recordings or any information relating to the content of conversations, but officials at the time also sought to conceal they had done so in requesting court approval.

Some, possibly all, of those fired were involved in that effort, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss personnel matters.

The subpoena for Ms. Wiles’s records was largely restricted to her communications with lawyers working for Trump, or witnesses in the Trump cases.

Prosecutors were interested in determining whether the benefit of legal counsel paid by Trump-related fund-raising entities was being used as an inducement to persuade witnesses not to cooperate in the investigations.

And if the DOJ had been similarly weaponized against a Democrat running for president, the New York Times would be screaming bloody murder.

Kash Patel obviously now has an even more vested interest in who asked for these subpoenas, and who decided to hide them. I don’t think he’s going to let this one go – and I don’t think the firing of six to ten FBI employees is going to be the end of it, either.

Featured image via Federal Bureau of Investigation on Flickr, cropped, public domain