A break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the 1970s set off a chain of events that ended a presidency. Operatives tied to President Richard Nixon installed wiretaps inside the Watergate complex. When it was exposed, the fallout reshaped American politics.
Now a bombshell report from Reuters reveals Biden’s FBI carried out a Wategate-style operation against Donald Trump and his 2024 presidential campaign.
According to Reuters, the FBI under then-President Joe Biden secretly obtained Susie Wiles’ phone records while she was a private citizen working on behalf of Trump’s 2024 campaign. Two anonymous FBI officials also said that Biden’s FBI “recorded a phone call between Wiles and her attorney” in 2023.
“Wiles’ attorney was aware that the call was being recorded, and consented to it, but Susie Wiles was not,” Reuters reported. Kash Patel, whom the FBI also spied on at the time, told Reuters the phone records obtained by Biden’s FBI “extended into Wiles’ time as Trump’s co-campaign manager.”
According to Reuters, Biden’s FBI “subpoenaed records of phone calls” made by Wiles and Patel between 2022 and 2023.
“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 told Reuters in a statement.
Patel told Reuters that the records were classified as “prohibited.” The designation buried the files in the FBI’s computers, complicating Patel’s efforts to uncover corruption in the bureau after he took office in February of 2025.
Notably, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley sounded the alarm about “prohibited” filing classifications last June. Grassley said in June that this classification “allows FBI [to] pull the wool over the eyes of [Congress] + the IG + even their own employees.”
The news comes months after Grassley released a trove of documents showing Biden’s FBI and Department of Justice compiled what’s been described as an “enemies list” of Republicans to target and subpoenaed the phone records of several high-ranking Republicans as part of the “Arctic Frost” inquiry. As The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland explained, Arctic Frost was designed to “target Republicans in key battleground states.”
Such actions would be career-ending if perpetrators were held to the same standards established during the Watergate scandal.
The Watergate scandal began after a break-in at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., where the Democratic National Committee headquarters were located. Operatives associated with Nixon’s reelection campaign wiretapped several phones used by DNC staff. The devices malfunctioned, and the team of operatives went back to fix them but were caught in the act and arrested. Senate hearings in 1973 exposed the scope of the incident, and dozens were convicted on various charges, including wiretapping and conspiracy. While there’s no hard evidence that Nixon knew of or ordered the raid beforehand, he ultimately paid the price of the political bombshell scandal. Facing impeachment proceedings, Nixon would resign from office and was later pardoned by President Gerald Ford.
Watergate reshaped American politics. Biden’s FBI spying on Wiles, Patel, and other Republicans is far worse, and the perpetrators should face consequences as severe, if not more so.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist. Brianna graduated from Fordham University with a degree in International Political Economy. Her work has been featured on Newsmax, Fox News, Fox Business and RealClearPolitics. Follow Brianna on X: @briannalyman2
