Secret Search Warrant: Former President Trump’s Twitter Account Under Investigation
The special counsel for Donald Trump has secured a search warrant for the former president’s Twitter account, @realDonaldTrump, according to the filing in the brand-new, unsealed court case. Twitter was not allowed to inform Trump that a search warrant had been acquired for his account due to the search’s extreme secrecy, and the business, now known as “X,” was fined $350,000 for delaying the presentation of the records that the search warrant required.
Special counsel Jack Smith asked for a search warrant to look into “data and records” pertaining to Trump’s account. In January 2023, Smith’s office requested the order because it was working on criminal proceedings against Trump in the DC District Court related to attempts to rig the 2020 presidential election.
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The records were eventually created by Twitter, according to the complaint, and are now available to the public in the US Court of Appeals for the Circuit.
The court expressed fear that Trump would leave the case and avoid prosecution.
The question of whether Trump should be made aware of the search warrant was a point of contention between Twitter and the office of special counsel Jack Smith for several months. The conflict was made public on Wednesday when the DC Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district court ruling that sided with Twitter and barred them from informing Trump about the search.
The district court determined there was a “reasonable basis to believe” that revealing the search warrant to former President Trump would “jeopardise the ongoing investigation” and give him the chance to obliterate evidence, change patterns, or alert co-conspirators, according to the DC Circuit’s opinion.
In addition, the district court found that the need for a non-disclosure order was justified since it gave “reasonable cause to believe that the subject of the warrant will flee,” according to a footnote.
The footnote stated that “in the end, the district court did not trust the flight risk.”
The platform, which changed its name to “X” during its legal dispute with co-defendants, did not raise any objections to releasing the material requested by Smith but contended that alerting Trump about the search warrant would be illegal under the Stored Communications Act and the First Amendment. a law that might compel internet service providers to hand up user data.
The non-disclosure agreement was modified throughout the court process to let Twitter to “notify the former president about the existence and content of the warrant,” but the identity of the case agent was kept secret.
Because “additional information that became publicly available about the investigation into the former president after the non-disclosure order was issued,” according to Strong, the co-defendants changed their position to permit some disclosures.
