Originally published August 16, 2023 10:00 am PDT
In a recent revelation, Special Counsel Jack Smith has managed to obtain direct messages and draft tweets of former President Donald Trump from Twitter, overcoming significant resistance from the social media giant.
The nature and content of these messages, as well as their authorship, are yet to be determined, court files indicate.
The central focus of the conflict lay in the demand by the prosecutors that Twitter keep Trump in the dark about the search warrant they had acquired.
Twitter resisted, expressing concerns that the information sought might be protected under executive privilege.
In a courtroom exchange, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell questioned Twitter’s motivations, wondering aloud, “Is this to make Donald Trump feel like he is a particularly welcomed new renewed user of Twitter?”
In defense of the platform’s stance, attorney George Varghese from WilmerHale replied, “Twitter has no interest other than litigation of its constitutional rights.”
Further pressing Twitter, Judge Howell probed, “Is it because the new CEO wants to cozy up with the former president?”
Prosecutors sought a comprehensive range of data from Trump’s Twitter account, as detailed by Politico.
They requested information related to any accounts associated with @realdonaldtrump, and all devices and IP addresses that accessed this handle between October 2020 and January 2021.
Additionally, they aimed to retrieve the account’s privacy settings and history.
The investigation also focused on every tweet that was created, drafted, liked, or retweeted by @realdonaldtrump, even those that might have been deleted later.
The probe extended to encompass all direct messages sent, received, or stored in draft form in association with Trump’s account.
Search records and location data for the user of @realdonaldtrump, spanning the period from October 2020 to January 2021, were also on the list of data requests.
Judge Howell posited to Twitter’s legal representatives that Trump was likely not using Twitter’s direct messaging to converse on official matters with senior government officials.
She emphatically stated, “You don’t even know the half about the very warrant you are coming in here to delay the execution of.”
For context, Twitter, now rebranded as X, permanently suspended Trump’s account in the aftermath of the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021.
The former president didn’t hold back in his response, criticizing what he described as “crooked Joe Biden’s” Department of Justice for targeting his Twitter account in secrecy and taking a “major ‘hit’ on my civil rights.”
