President Donald Trump and his supporters were targeted by four consecutive FBI code-named counterintelligence investigations over the last decade that secretly subjected hundreds of innocent Americans to privacy-invading tactics and essentially treated the man twice elected president as a national security threat for most of the first nine years of his political career, according to interviews and documents reviewed by Just the News.FBI Director Kash Patel has personally led the effort to review the operations code-named Crossfire Hurricane, Round River, Plasmic Echo and Arctic Frost that stretched from summer 2016 to January 2025, uncovering evidence of a far-reaching dragnet that in some cases may have been predicated on false, misleading or uncorroborated justifications, officials said.
Many of the investigative files were hidden from view, even from most FBI agents, because they were marked “prohibited access” and controlled carefully by FBI leadership.
Patel’s search has been aided by whistleblowers inside his agency, a handful of senior bureau executives close to the director and some members of Congress, particularly Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.
FBI’s work hijacked by politics, invading citizens’ privacy
Those who have seen the records told Just the News they chronicle how the FBI’s expanded counterterrorism and counterintelligence missions after the Sept, 11, 2001, terrorist attacks eventually became hijacked by politics and led agents to deploy tools meant for terrorists and spies against everyday Americans in a bid to find a way to bring criminal cases against Trump.
One whistleblower this month told the FBI that surveillance and monitoring of Trump figures continued right up to the president’s January 2025 inauguration, according to multiple interviews.
Few inside Trump’s orbit were spared from targeting by their stature: a dozen members of Congress and their staffers, his future chief of staff Susie Wiles, journalists, campaign advisers, defense lawyers, and even Patel himself had their privacy pierced by warrants, wiretaps, FISA surveillance, phone record analysis, FBI assessments, or grand juries.
Many targets and subjects fell under the bureau’s definition of special circumstances targets because they have recognized constitutionally protected privileges – like lawyers, members of Congress, journalists, political figures, and a filmmaker – remains a very open question.
At least 1,200 people that fall into the categories of special circumstances targets were investigated under assessments by the FBI between 2018 and 2024 during Wray’s tenure, an explosive recent audit report to Congress revealed.
You can read that report here.
Dhillon: “Criminal charges are indeed possible”
“There is growing evidence that may support a case that the FBI engaged between 2016 and 2025 in a conspiracy to violate the civil rights of Trump and his supporters under the color of government power,” a senior official with direct knowledge of the FBI’s current reviews told Just the News.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon recently told Just the News that criminal charges are indeed possible if federal officials intentionally violated civil liberties in politically weaponized investigations.
“The Department of Justice is at the heart of considering these issues right now, so I can’t really talk about the specifics, but in general terms, yes, the Civil Rights Division and the DOJ generally does have the tool of a criminal conspiracy statute for conspiracy against rights,” she said. “And this dates back to the start of the Ku Klux Klan.”
“I would say all of those things are on the table for lawyers and DOJ officials and others who conspired with them at the state level, state prosecutors, state police and so forth, who conspired to violate civil rights, and it could also include executive branch officials from the first administration who knowingly conspired and orchestrated a violation of federal civil rights,” she added
Just the News has confirmed that federal prosecutors lin Miami, led by U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones, are investigating the weaponization of intelligence and law enforcement against Trump and his allies as they build a potential grand conspiracy case spanning 2016, 2020, and 2024.
Evidence in the first and last of the counterintelligence operations is well known and mostly released: Crossfire Hurricane, which probed now-disproven Russia collusion allegations, and Arctic Frost, which looked at Trump’s effort to offer the Senate alternate electors ahead of the 2020 election certification on Jan. 6, 2021.
Documents declassified last year show, among other things, that the Obama administration and its intelligence officials misled Congress and others when claiming that the discredited anti-Trump Steele Dossier was not used in the 2017 U.S. intelligence community assessment on Russian meddling.
The Arctic Frost probe alone targeted nearly 400 conservative groups and individuals associated with Trump, according to evidence recently released by the House and Senate Judiciary Committees.
But officials said the two middle operations – which are just beginning to be declassified so Congress can be fully read in – may produce some of the most troubling abuses uncovered by Patel and his team and are the focus of ongoing criminal investigations into former FBI and DOJ personnel.
For instance, the Plasmic Echo investigation that explored whether Trump illegally took classified documents to his Mar-a-Lago home after his first term has already turned up evidence that FBI agents believed did not meet the legal standard for a search warrant but raided the president’s home anyway in August 2022 after being overruled by DOJ, according to a bombshell revelation recently from Patel.
“[We] continue to pass versions back and forth after our pause and concern about [probable cause] for any of the locations outlined…” an agent wrote to the team. “What is the guidance for continuing to work on this document without any new information?”
Biden directly linked to lawfare against Trump
The Biden White House was also directly linked to the classified documents investigation into Trump, despite its denials, records show. Then-Attorney General Merrick Garland said he “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant” for the FBI’s unprecedented raid of Mar-a-Lago.
Patel and a small team of inner circle agents also have found proof that the bureau, under former Director Chris Wray, obtained Patel’s own phone records, as well as those of Wiles, after Trump announced he was running in the 2024 presidential election and wiretapped a call between the future White House chief of staff on the pretense that her defense lawyer consented. Wiles’ lawyer has issued a statement adamantly denying he ever consented to such monitoring, raising the possibility false representations were made to a court for phone monitoring and the now infamous raid on Mar-a-Lago.
“If I ever pulled a stunt like that, I wouldn’t – and shouldn’t – have a license to practice law,” the unidentified lawyer told Axios. “I’m as shocked as Susie.”
Sources told Just the News that the FBI has an intensive criminal probe ongoing and the first decisions on whether indictments are warranted could be made in a few weeks.
Punishment for asking about Biden family’s Ukraine exploits
Meanwhile, the Round River investigation may prove the most troubling of all the counterintelligence probes targeting the Trump universe, though at present it remains mostly classified.
Agents only recently discovered the opening memo and files for the probe, which was started in the bureau’s Pittsburgh field office by targeting Trump lawyer and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani for his efforts to investigate Hunter Biden’s and Joe Biden’s exploits in Ukraine, but it then expanded to look at numerous public figures who spoke out about Biden family corruption concerns.
Early whistleblower evidence from that case has raised grave concerns inside Congress about potential civil liberty violations, specifically that people in that investigation may have been targeted solely by virtue of their speech. Lawmakers fear the standards for who was targeted were simply talking points deemed by FBI counterintelligence to be “Russian disinformation.”
In other words, reporters, lawmakers, moviemakers and lawyers who made certain allegations or raised questions about the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine may have been assessed to be national security threats aligned with Russia worthy of investigation and treated as purveyors of disinformation interfering in elections, sources said.
Sen. Grassley’s staff has played a critical role in helping the FBI search for records, passing along information from agency whistleblowers who sought protection from Congress during the Biden years long before Patel took over. One of Grassley’s letters in 2022 appears to refer to the Round River operation, without naming it, and raised serious concerns about its constitutionality.
Grassley: “FBI’s false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation”
“The information provided to my office involves concerns about the FBI’s receipt and use of derogatory information relating to Hunter Biden, and the FBI’s false portrayal of acquired evidence as disinformation,” the senator wrote. “The volume and consistency of these allegations substantiate their credibility and necessitate this letter.
He added: “Based on allegations, verified and verifiable derogatory information on Hunter Biden was falsely labeled as disinformation.” The files also show the bureau may have targeted the Pittsburgh office as the launching point to impede an effort by then-Attorney General Bill Barr to ask his federal prosecution team in the same city to investigate why an FBI informant report alleging Biden family corruption was not fully investigated when it first came in.
Grassley and Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., previously told Patel that, in August 2020, “we were provided an unnecessary briefing by the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force that was designed to undermine our investigation into the Biden family.”
Most of the files on Round River, Plasmic Echo, and Arctic Frost were buried from Patel’s view when he arrived in what were known as prohibited access files, a tactic used during the Wray-era of the FBI to shield from view politically sensitive cases inside the bureau’s case management system known as Sentinel.
That left only certain officials aware of their existence, often in hidden files in secure storage areas known as sensitive compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs.
Patel has assigned a small team of agents to hunt for the files and uncover abuses, and he has been assisted greatly by a handful of senior executives who can navigate and find well hidden evidence in the bureau’s storage system.
Another complicating factor is that the bureau just lost the man who produced much of the most explosive evidence to Congress over the last 14 months, Congressional Affairs Office Chief Marshall Yates, who was widely popular on Capitol Hill for achieving a level of transparency after years of stonewalled congressional requests, announced he was stepping down.
Deputy Director Andrew Bailey has been taking the lead in organizing the approach going forward, but he ruffled feathers internally and in Congress with comments some took to suggest he was going too slowly to reveal the amount of damaging information being sent to Congress to slow demands to fire agents who were involved in abusive investigations.
Bailey allayed those concerns with a memo Friday stating that production of evidence to Congress and to DOJ investigations was “imperative,” according to officials who received or saw the memo.
