Special counsel Jack Smith has reportedly gained access to an “extraordinary array of data” from Twitter about former President Donald Trump’s personal account on the platform, according to newly unsealed court records.
The fight to gain access to the account happened in January and February before Twitter was renamed “X” and was met with stiff resistance by owner and then-CEO Elon Musk.
U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell fined the company $350,000 for taking too long to comply with the search warrant and criticized the company for taking “extraordinary” steps not to turn over the data and to allegedly warn Trump about the search warrant.
The judge suggested that Musk was perhaps trying to “cozy up” to Trump to get him to use the site again, which Twitter’s lawyers rejected.
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POLITICO reported that Twitter was ordered to turn over the following information to prosecutors:
- Accounts associated with @realdonaldtrump that the former president might have used on the same device.
- Devices used to log into the @realdonaldtrump account
- IP addresses used to log into the account between October 2020 and January 2021.
- Privacy settings and history
- All tweets “created, drafted, favorited/liked, or retweeted” by @realdonaldtrump, including any subsequently deleted.
- All direct messages “sent from, received by, stored in draft form in, or otherwise associated with” @realdonaldtrump
- All records of searches from October 2020 to January 2021
- Location information for the user of @realdonaldtrump from October 2020 to January 2021
Trump responded to the news last week that Smith had obtained a search warrant to search his account by claiming it was an attack by the Biden administration.
“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,” Trump wrote on social media. “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?” he continued. “Did Deranged Jack Smith tell the Unselects to DESTROY & DELETE all evidence? These are DARK DAYS IN AMERICA!”