There’s a scene in every heist movie where the criminals think they’ve covered their tracks perfectly. The files are hidden. The evidence is buried. Nobody will ever know.

And then the new sheriff shows up, finds everything, and the whole thing unravels in spectacular fashion.

That’s exactly what just happened at the FBI. Except this isn’t a movie. It’s worse. It’s real, it involved spying on American citizens, and the people who got spied on are now the ones holding the keys.

The Setup

Rewind to 2023. Joe Biden is in the White House. Merrick Garland is running the DOJ like a man with a personal grudge and a government credit card. Jack Smith is conducting his “Arctic Frost” probe — the sprawling investigation into Trump that treated the former president like a Bond villain despite the fact that he was a private citizen at the time.

During that investigation, the FBI secretly obtained the phone records of Kash Patel and Susie Wiles. Not government officials. Private citizens. Patel — now the FBI Director. Wiles — now White House Chief of Staff.

The bureau pulled what are called “toll records,” which detail the timing and recipients of phone calls. They used subpoenas to get them. And then — here’s the part that should make your skin crawl — they labeled the files “Prohibited” and buried them in restricted access folders specifically designed to make them nearly impossible to find.

They didn’t just spy. They hid the receipts.

The Cover-Up Within the Cover-Up

This wasn’t sloppy. This was surgical. The FBI has used this exact trick before — they did the same thing with the Hunter Biden investigation, stashing files in prohibited folders where oversight couldn’t reach them. It’s a pattern. A system. A bureaucratic sleight of hand that lets corrupt officials operate in the dark while technically staying inside the building.

Patel spelled it out: “It is outrageous and deeply alarming that the previous FBI leadership secretly subpoenaed my own phone records — along with those of now White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles — using flimsy pretexts and burying the entire process in prohibited case files designed to evade all oversight.”

Flimsy pretexts. Prohibited case files. Designed to evade oversight. Those aren’t accusations from a conspiracy theory. Those are statements from the current Director of the FBI describing what he found when he walked into the building and started opening drawers.

The Firings

Wednesday, ten FBI agents were shown the door. Gone. Terminated. Over their involvement in the surveillance and the cover-up.

And according to Fox News, more firings could be coming. This wasn’t a rogue agent or a paperwork mistake. Ten people means a coordinated operation. Ten people means this had structure, approval, and execution across multiple levels. You don’t accidentally spy on future senior White House officials with a team of ten.

The Bigger Web

It gets deeper. Jack Smith’s team didn’t just target Patel and Wiles. The same type of toll records were sought for several Republican U.S. senators and at least one Republican House member. Let that register — a special counsel appointed by a Democratic administration was surveilling the communications of sitting members of Congress from the opposing party.

This is the kind of thing that, in any functioning democracy, would trigger an immediate independent investigation and wall-to-wall media coverage for weeks. Instead, most of the press will bury it by Friday because the target was Republicans and the perpetrators were Democrats.

The Irony That Writes Itself

The people who screamed about democracy dying in darkness spent four years building the surveillance state in the dark. They spied on political opponents. They hid the evidence. They used the most powerful law enforcement agency on earth as a political weapon and then booby-trapped the filing system so nobody could prove it.

And the two people they targeted? One of them now runs the FBI. The other runs the White House staff. Kash Patel didn’t just survive the operation — he inherited the building. He walked into the same offices where the orders were signed, opened the same file systems where the evidence was buried, and started cleaning house.

That’s not just karma. That’s a screenplay Hollywood wouldn’t touch because nobody would believe it.

Why This Can’t Be Forgotten

It’s tempting to treat this as just another item on the long list of Biden-era scandals. Another outrage in an ocean of outrages. But this one is different. This is the federal government using its intelligence apparatus to monitor private citizens who were associated with a political opponent, and then deliberately concealing the activity from future oversight.

That’s not politics. That’s the kind of thing that happens in countries Americans used to feel sorry for.

Biden may have been the figurehead, stumbling through press conferences and losing arguments with teleprompters. But underneath that performance, a machinery of political weaponization was running at full speed. Garland’s DOJ. Smith’s special counsel. Wray’s FBI. All of it pointed in one direction — at Trump and anyone in his orbit.

Ten agents are fired today. More may follow. Patel says he’s ripping out the rot, and based on what he’s finding in those prohibited folders, the rot goes deep.

The old FBI buried the files and assumed they’d never be found. The new FBI found them anyway.

And now everybody’s going to see what was inside.