OPINION:
Special counsel Jack Smith must be counting on Donald Trump’s prodigious Twitter operation to put the former president in prison.
We have learned, thanks to legal motions filed by a coalition of news media, that he issued a sealed warrant this past January that cast a huge net over @realDonaldTrump. Mr. Smith not only demanded from Twitter (now Elon Musk’s X) what Mr. Trump tweeted about the 2020 election, but also wants copies of retweets and likes, meaning that by now, he has collected a database that might well include you.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama appointee, granted Mr. Smith’s request carte blanche.
In August, Mr. Smith brought an indictment in Washington against Mr. Trump, who now has his own social media platform, Truth Social, on which he regularly castigates the prosecutor.
The four-count indictment accuses Mr. Trump of defrauding the United States by repeatedly asserting falsely that he, not President Biden, won the election. Mr. Smith argues that Mr. Trump unleashed broad charges of voting fraud and put lawyers and activists in place to overturn the election.
Mr. Trump’s election challenge reached fever pitch on Jan. 6 when supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to stop a 2020 certification vote. The Department of Justice has arrested over 1,000 protesters, and some have received lengthy prison terms.
(As a side note, as a reporter in 2020-21, I wrote a series of stories questioning the legitimacy of Mr. Trump’s “Stop the Steal.” I wrote that his Jan. 6 speech to the devoted on the National Mall included a list of supposed election crimes that didn’t happen.)
But is that a crime or free speech? Was it a crime for liberal activists to pressure electors not to vote for Mr. Trump to culminate his 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton? The activists were trying to reverse the 2016 election by intimidating electors. No one was criminally charged.
Mr. Trump’s fate will be in the hands of a D.C. jury, which demographics show will be a pool of liberals who will surely convict him. They would likely convict him for chewing gum in high school, so the charges stemming from Jan. 6 will lead to 30 minutes of deliberation.
To cement that sure bet, Mr. Smith went after Mr. Trump’s Twitter world.
His newly unsealed 14-page warrant demanded from Twitter: “The content of all tweets created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted by [Mr. Trump] (including all such deleted tweets), and all associated multimedia, metadata, and logs.”
This next warrant section demands that Twitter disclose virtually all of Mr. Trump’s Twitter-connected supporters. He has over 87 million Twitter followers.
“All information from the ‘Connect’ or ‘Notifications’ tab for the account, including all lists of Twitter users who have favorited or retweeted tweets posted by the account, as well as all tweets that include the username associated with the account (i.e., ‘mentions’ or ‘replies’).”
The warrant goes further: “All users [the Trump account] has followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked, and all users who have followed, unfollowed, muted, unmuted, blocked, or unblocked [@realDonaldTrump].”
And just to be sure, there is this catchall directive to Twitter: “All other content, records, and other information relating to all other interactions between [@realDonaldTrump] and other Twitter users from October 2020 to January 2021.”
I can’t guess the number of individual names and other personal information Mr. Smith now has in his prosecutorial database.
Mr. Smith also wants @realDonaldTrump’s direct messages.
“The content of all direct messages sent from, received by, stored in draft form in, or otherwise associated with [MR. Trump] including all attachments, multimedia, header information, metadata, and logs.”
And he wants a complete list of Mr. Trump’s devices and their operating systems.
“Devices used to login to or access the account, including all device identifiers, attributes, user agent strings, and information about networks and connections, cookies, operating systems, and apps and web browsers.”
It is too bad that Attorney General Merrick Garland runs such a partisan Justice Department. And it’s too bad that President Biden a year ago at the White House said publicly, “I’m making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become the next president again.”
This banana republic stuff was a clear message to Mr. Garland that the president wants his chief 2024 rival prosecuted.
A less partisan prosecutor would have also noted that there had never been an election like 2020’s. It was conducted in the middle of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. The country was shut down in places. A massive influx of absentee ballots flooded the mail. Some were stuffed in isolated drop boxes.
Democratic lawyers went into court in swing states to persuade judges to change the rules on the run. They wanted extended ballot acceptance past election day. They wanted looser signature requirements.
Meanwhile, liberal Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the unprecedented step of pouring over $400 million (“Zuck Bucks”) into left-wing activist groups that then embedded with election workers to get out the vote in Democratic neighborhoods. Election researcher William Doyle chronicled the cash influx in The Federalist.
At the same time, Mr. Zuckerberg censored the Hunter Biden laptop revelations in October 2020 after the New York Post splashed the computer’s seedy contents and former Obama administration intelligence officials endorsed a lie that the hard drive was concocted by the Kremlin.
Oh, there were factions conspiring with the Kremlin, but none of them was Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump suffered through an unethical and pointless Russia election inquiry. At its heart was a dossier financed by Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign that was sourced to the Kremlin and was filled with false allegations. I call the dossier the biggest political hoax in modern American history. Republicans often use the simple description “fake.”
Its wild, unverified claims did not stop the FBI, the liberal news media and Democrats led by Rep. Adam B. Schiff from joining forces to constantly cite, quote and praise the dossier to ruin the Trump presidency and create turmoil across the nation.
Special counsel Jack Smith might call it a conspiracy to defraud the United States.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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