Jaap Arriesn | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Special counsel Jack Smith, originally of 2023, obtained a search warrant for the Twitter account of Donald Trump as a part of his criminal investigation into the previous president’s effort to reverse his loss within the 2020 election, a federal appeals court decision revealed Wednesday.
Twitter, now often called X, initially delayed turning over materials sought by that warrant, and had filed a sealed court case in search of to dam an order barring the social media giant from telling Trump anyone else concerning the warrant.
The appeals court ruling says Twitter accomplished its production of Trump’s account information for Smith’s office on Feb. 9.
The 34-page decision also upheld a lower court judge’s $350,000 contempt sanction on Twitter for failing to comply with the warrant until after a three-day deadline.
Smith’s office had argued, and the lower court judge agreed, that if Twitter notified Trump of the warrant’s existence it might put the investigation in danger and provides him a likelihood to destroy evidence that was sought by the warrant, based on the choice.
Twitter appealed the contempt ruling and the nondisclosure order, arguing that it violated the corporate’s free speech rights under the Structure’s First Amendment to speak with “its subscriber,” Trump.
And Twitter argued that by keeping the warrant secret from Trump, he can be unable to shield communications made using his Twitter account from prosecutors by asserting executive privilege.
The corporate also said the order violated the federal Stored Communications Act.
The unanimous ruling against the corporate on all points was issued by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
Two of the judges on the panel, J. Michelle Childs and Florence Pan, were appointed by President Joe Biden, while the third, Cornelia Pillard, was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
The choice revealed Wednesday includes sealed information that was not visible in the general public copy.
Twitter was bought last 12 months by Elon Musk, the billionaire who also heads Tesla, and SpaceX. He recently renamed Twitter as X.
Trump, in a response to the ruling, wrote on his own social media site, “Just discovered that Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ secretly attacked my Twitter account, making it some extent to not let me learn about this major ‘hit’ on my civil rights.”
“My Political Opponent goes CRAZY attempting to infringe on my Campaign for President. Nothing like this has ever happened before,” Trump wrote in his Truth Social post. “Does the First Amendment still exist? Did Deranged Jack Smith tell the Unselects to DESTROY & DELETE all evidence? These are DARK DAYS IN AMERICA!”
A spokesman for Smith declined to comment to CNBC on the ruling.
X and the attorneys who represented the corporate in its appeal didn’t immediately reply to CNBC’s requests for comment.
Special counsel investigation
Smith has obtained two indictments of Trump.
One, filed June in federal court in southern Florida, charges the previous president with retaining classified documents after he left the White House, and attempting to hide those records from government officials.
The second indictment, filed last week in D.C. federal court, charges Trump with a fraudulent scheme to reverse his loss within the 2020 election to Biden.
Trump was lively on Twitter before the election, and within the weeks after it leading as much as the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol, which disrupted a joint session of Congress meeting to verify Biden’s victory.
Trump used his Twitter account to advertise his false claims of election fraud and to encourage supporters to go to Washington on Jan. 6, when he held a rally calling on lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject certification of the election results.
“Big protest in D.C. on January sixth,” Trump tweeted on Dec. 19, 2020, at 1:42 a.m. ET.
“Be there, might be wild!”
Smith’s office applied for and obtained the search warrant for Trump’s account on Jan. 17, 2023. The warrant was related to his probe of Trump’s actions after the 2020 election.
The warrant “directed Twitter to provide data and records related to the ‘@realDonaldTrump’ Twitter account,” based on the appeals court ruling.
The special counsel at the identical time obtained a nondisclosure order from a Washington, D.C., federal district court judge that “prohibited Twitter from disclosing the existence or contents of the search warrant to any person.”
“The district court found probable cause to look the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses,” the choice noted.
“Furthermore, the district court found that there have been ‘reasonable grounds to consider’ that disclosing the warrant to former President Trump ‘would seriously jeopardize the continuing investigation’ by giving him ‘a chance to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior .. or notify confederates,” the ruling says.
A footnote within the ruling revealed that the lower-court judge “also found reason to consider that the previous President would ‘flee from prosecution.'”
Smith’s office “later acknowledged, nevertheless, that it had ‘errantly included flight from prosecution as a predicate’ in its application” and “the district court didn’t depend on risk of flight in its ultimate evaluation,” the appeals ruling noted.