Special Counsel Jack Smith sought and obtained a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account in January, according to court documents released Wednesday.
Twitter initially resisted complying with the warrant, resulting in a federal judge fining the company $350,000 for contempt. The prosecutor’s search was secret, and Twitter, since rebranded as X, was barred from telling Mr. Trump about the search warrant.
The government proposed escalating sanctions against Twitter, starting at $50,000 per day, for missing a deadline to turn over the material, and the district court agreed. The company appealed, but the U.S. Appeals Court for the District of Columbia upheld the civil contempt sanctions against Twitter.
“Twitter never raised any objection to the sanctions formula, despite having several opportunities to do so,” the court ruled. “The company thus appeared to acquiesce to the formula. Moreover, the $350,000 sanction ultimately imposed was not unreasonable, given Twitter’s $40-billion valuation and the court’s goal of coercing Twitter’s compliance.”
The court said Twitter “ultimately complied with the warrant.”
Mr. Trump’s tweets are publicly available, but the company also holds other information such as location data, direct messages, drafts of tweets, and the type of device from which a tweet was posted.
The former president blasted the newly disclosed search.
“Just found out that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ secretly attacked my Twitter account, making it a point not to let me know about this major ’hit’ on my civil rights,” he wrote on his site Truth Social.
“My Political Opponent is going CRAZY trying to infringe on my Campaign for President. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Does the First Amendment still exist? Did Deranged Jack Smith tell the Unselects [congressional investigators] to DESTROY & DELETE all evidence? These are DARK DAYS IN AMERICA!” he posted.
The special counsel, who is now prosecuting Mr. Trump on criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, obtained the search warrant on Jan. 17.
In a footnote, the appeals court noted that Mr. Smith’s office “errantly” included in its search warrant application as assertion that Mr. Trump was a flight risk.
“The district court also found reason to believe that the former President would ’flee from prosecution,’” the appellate court wrote. “The government later acknowledged, however, that it had ’errantly included flight from prosecution as a predicate’ in its application. The district court did not rely on risk of flight in its ultimate analysis.”
The federal court order directed Twitter to produce data and records related to the “@realDonaldTrump” Twitter account. A nondisclosure order also sought and obtained by Mr. Smith prohibited Twitter from disclosing the existence or contents of the search warrant to anyone.
A federal district court found that there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that disclosing the warrant to Mr. Trump “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates,” according to a federal appeals court ruling.
The warrant required Twitter to tum over all requested information by Jan. 27.
On Feb. 1, 2023, four days after the compliance deadline, Twitter objected to producing any of the account information, the court said. The company did not question the validity of the search warrant but argued the nondisclosure order was invalid under the First Amendment.
Twitter said it would not comply with the warrant until the district court assessed the legality of the nondisclosure order.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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