Last mentioned: Feb 26, 2026
Special Counsel Appointment
Merrick Garland appoints Jack Smith to oversee Trump-related investigations.
Public Disclosure
Patel reveals the existence of the subpoenas, alleging government overreach.
Leadership Change
Kash Patel is confirmed as FBI Director following the 2024 election transition.
Subpoenas Issued
FBI secretly obtains phone records for Patel and Wiles during the active probe.
FBI Director Kash Patel revealed that the bureau subpoenaed his and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ phone records during the Biden administration's investigations into Donald Trump. The disclosure raises significant questions regarding the oversight of federal investigative powers and the protocols for handling sensitive data involving political figures.
This page surfaces every story mentioning Jack Smith across our legal coverage. We track each entity's appearance over time so readers can trace how the narrative evolves — which developments are isolated incidents, which build into longer arcs, and which reframe how operators in the space think about the entity. Story selection uses the same multi-source verification gate applied across the rest of our coverage.
Read our editorial methodology for how we identify, deduplicate, and score entity references. Our glossary defines the technical terms used across stories on this page, and our trends index contextualizes individual developments against the longer-running legal beat. Cross-entity comparisons live on our compare view.
| What you see | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Story count | Number of distinct stories where Jack Smith was a primary or referenced actor. |
| Recency clustering | Whether mentions are concentrated in a recent window (a news cycle) or distributed (a sustained arc). |
| Sentiment distribution | Aggregate sentiment of the stories mentioning this entity, weighted by impact score. |
| Cross-niche links | When the same entity surfaces in our sibling networks, we link to those views to enrich context. |