At least 10 FBI employees connected to an investigation of Donald Trump have reportedly been dismissed following revelations that the agency subpoenaed personal records of current FBI director Kash Patel and White House chief of staff Susie Wiles in the years before Trump returned to office.
The ousters, reported by CBS News and CNN, were linked to the federal investigation led by former justice department special counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents that were found at his Florida Mar-a-Lago resort after his first term.
During the course of that investigation, Reuters reported on Wednesday, the FBI subpoenaed records of phone calls made by Patel and Wiles, who were both close to Trump but private citizens at the time.
The FBI has not yet responded to requests for comment from the Guardian. But in a statement to Reuters, Patel rebuked the agency he now heads and repeated claims that the actions are evidence of government overreach perpetuated by the Biden administration.
“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,” Patel said.
Along with his possession of highly classified documents post-presidency, Trump was also under federal investigation for accusations that he interfered with the 2020 presidential election. Smith has said he was confident the findings from his investigations would have yielded criminal charges against Trump had they not been dropped after he won the presidency and returned to the White House.
Smith and his team secured indictments in 2023, accusing Trump of illegally retaining classified documents following his first term in office and plotting to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. Smith dropped both cases after Trump won the 2024 election, citing a justice department policy against prosecuting a sitting president.
On Monday, a federal judge blocked further publication of the report from Smith, detailing the findings of his investigations.
It has long been clear Patel was considered an important part of the documents investigation. As a top adviser to Trump at the time, he was asked to testify before a federal grand jury in Washington in 2022 about the unauthorized retention of the government documents, and was granted limited immunity for his statements.
This is not the first public firing at the FBI under Patel’s tenure. Last September, three former senior officials, each with decades of service, sued Patel and the federal government for wrongful termination after they said they were fired for investigating Trump.
In November, the bureau fired an official who had been there for 27 years, after Patel became infuriated over reports in the press that he’d used a government plane for personal use.
Reuters contributed to this story
