By John Solomon and Jerry Dunleavy
Published: March 9, 2026 11:31pm
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.
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.
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/trump-targeted-four-consecutive-fbi-counterintel-probes-ensnaring