Trump targeted by four FBI code-named counterintel probes that ensnared hundreds of Americans

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, and political figures.

Even a political consultant turned documentary filmmaker who investigated Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings before joining Trump’s 2024 campaign was recently notified he was targeted in a criminal investigation that only recently was shut down, according to letters between Congress and the FBI reviewed by Just the News.

Michael Caputo had his emails and communications seized in 2023 by a “classified subpoena” issued about two weeks after he joined the Trump campaign and the email account the bureau penetrated “contained correspondence on The Trump Campaign’s private strategies and deliberations,” the correspondence stated.

Patel’s FBI has informed Congress that probe has been shut down. But the question of how so many Americans were targeted remains open.

At least 1,200 people that fall into the categories of special circumstances targets or subject 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.

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