On a single day in March 2023, Jack Smith's team logged 39 phone calls from Susie Wiles' device. Not calls she made to them. Calls they were tracking — to attorneys, to journalists, to campaign contacts, to an extension belonging to Melania Trump.

Wiles is now the first woman to serve as White House Chief of Staff. At the time, she was Donald's campaign manager whose metadata the special counsel's office was quietly harvesting at the direction of Merrick Garland and Christopher Wray.

The surveillance operation, internally code-named "Plasmic Echo," swept up communications involving 44 current and former members of Congress and nearly 50 journalists. The probe, launched in connection with the 2022 Mar-a-Lago search, was set up to hopefully produce charges related to improper retention of classified and national-defense material and possible obstruction. What it actually built was a surveillance architecture that captured the phone activity of a sitting president's political rival, his staff, and dozens of lawmakers who had nothing to do with the case.

Julian Epstein — former chief counsel for the House Judiciary Committee's Democratic bench and former staff director to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee — looked at the record and didn't mince around. "It's hard to think of good justifications for this," Epstein said. "To me, it feels a little Nixonian."

That's not a Fox News contributor. That's not a MAGA loyalist. That's a career Democratic staff operative who ran oversight for his party and concluded that his own side's Justice Department behaved like Nixon's.

Epstein went further: "If this report is true, then it's pretty bad... better have some darn good explanations." When pressed on whether national security justifications could cover the breadth of the collection, his answer was two words that land harder than a paragraph of analysis. The justification "seems like a stretch."

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, acknowledged the problem back in July. "Republicans are rightly concerned about the possible breach of norms," he said. When a sitting Democratic, who has openly opposed Trump in the past, concedes that Republicans have a legitimate grievance about FBI overreach, you know the jig is up for Democrats.

The Nixon comparison isn't rhetorical decoration. In 1971, White House counsel John Dean wrote a memo proposing to "use the available federal machinery to screw our political enemies." That memo became the foundation of Nixon's enemies list, developed by top adviser Charles Colson. The difference between 1971 and 2023 is that Nixon's team wrote the quiet part down and got caught. The Biden-era FBI apparently decided the quiet part was just standard operating procedure.

Theo Wold, who served as acting assistant U.S. attorney general under Trump and later as Idaho's solicitor general, put it plainly: "The Deep State is real. They have abused their authority for political gain."

White House spokesperson Lauren Bis called Smith's operation "a disgraceful abuse of government power." Former RNC official Elizabeth Pipko noted that Wiles' story — a woman targeted by government surveillance who went on to become the most powerful staffer in the West Wing — "should inspire young women" who see how political figures "can become targets."

Sen. Charles Grassley and the GOP-led Senate Judiciary Committee have been pressing for full disclosure on the scope of "Plasmic Echo." The July 14 disclosures revealed the scale. The question now is whether accountability follows, or whether the institutional machinery protects itself the way it always does.

Forty-four members of Congress. Nearly fifty journalists. The future Chief of Staff's calls to the First Lady.

Nixon needed a plumbers unit and a cover-up. The FBI just needed a special counsel and a codename.