Donald Trump’s Twitter DMs Were Obtained By Special Counsel, Newly Unsealed Documents Reveal — Update

Ted Johnson
·5 min read
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UPDATE: Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained direct messages from former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, along with draft tweets and other data.

That was among the revelations in newly unsealed court documents, showing the scope of a search warrant of the @realdonaldtrump account that Smith’s team obtained earlier this year. The Elon Musk-owned company challenged the terms of a non-disclosure order that prevented it from informing Trump of the existence of the search warrant. Twitter, now renamed X, eventually complied, but was fined $350,000 for its delay.

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The unsealed documents included a transcript of proceedings in February before U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell. An attorney for Twitter, George Varghese, told her that “there are confidential communications associated with this account.” He added that Twitter “didn’t know the context of it,” but said that they were able to discern that there were DMs on the account by analyzing the account’s storage information.

During the hearing, while Varghese argued that there may be executive privilege issues tied to the DMs, Howell was unfazed. In fact, she asked whether Twitter was “trying to make up for the fact that it kicked Donald Trump off Twitter for some period of time” and was now “standing up to protect First Amendment rights.” Her point was that Twitter seemed to be taking extra steps to protect Trump but had not done so for other users.

“Is this to make Donald Trump feel like he is a particularly welcomed new renewed user of Twitter here?” she asked.

“Twitter has no interest other than litigating its constitutional rights, your honor,” Varghese responded.

Read the unsealed Twitter documents.

PREVIOUSLY, August 9: Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant earlier this year for records related to former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, while the Elon Musk-owned platform was fined $350,000 for delaying its compliance with the court order.

The incident was revealed on Wednesday in an unsealed federal appellate opinion (Read it here), in which a three-judge panel upheld a lower court’s sanctions on the social media platform.

Under the order issued in January, Twitter, now renamed X, was prohibited from disclosing the existence of the search warrant, even to Trump.

Twitter challenged the nondisclosure order, arguing that it was a violation of the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act. The company also said that the enforcement of the search warrant should have been delayed until the non-disclosure issues were resolved.

In appellate opinion, Judge Florence Pan wrote that in granting the warrant in January, “the district court found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses. Moreover, the district court found that there were ‘reasonable grounds to believe’ that disclosing the warrant to former President Trump ‘would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation’ by giving him ‘an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates.”

Trump pled not guilty last week to four conspiracy charges brought by Smith over his efforts to retain power after the 2020 presidential election. The indictment referred to a number of Trump’s tweets, including one he posted as the attack on the Capitol was unfolding on January 6. Posted at 2:24 p.m. that day, the tweet read, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”

Twitter originally was given until January 27 to comply with the warrant and turn over the requested materials, but four days later, the social media platform formally challenged the order. At a February 7 hearing, the district court judge ruled that Twitter had to comply by 5 p.m. that day, while adopting the government’s recommendation of sanctions if the company did not do so. The recommended amount was $50,000 per day, and doubling for each day after that.

In her opinion, Pan wrote that “the court adopted that suggestion, noting that Twitter was sold for over $40 billion and that its owner’s net worth was over $180 billion. Twitter did not object to the sanctions formula.”

But Twitter’s production of the materials by that deadline was incomplete. Ultimately, the company was sanctioned for $350,000 for being in contempt of court, or three days of non-compliance.

Smith’s team eventually proposed in June that Twitter be able to notify Trump of the contents of the warrant, citing that public disclosure of investigations into the former president.

In upholding the non-disclosure order, Pan noted that it was limited in duration — 180 days — and wrote that “the speech restricted- disclosure of the existence or contents of the warrant – was limited to information that Twitter obtained only by virtue of its involvement in the government’s investigation. Courts have suggested that such information, procured from the government itself or pursuant to a court-ordered procedure, is entitled to less protection than information a speaker possesses independently.”

She added, “Importantly, Twitter remained free to raise general concerns about warrants or
nondisclosure orders, and to speak publicly about the January 6 investigation.”

Pan also found that the district court followed procedure in imposing the contempt sanctions, even as Twitter argued that it made a good faith effort to comply by the deadline.

She wrote that the district court “found that Twitter repeatedly represented to the court that it stood
ready to comply, even as Twitter waited until after the February 7 deadline ‘to raise,for the first time, multiple questions about the [w]arrant’s document demands.’ … Under those circumstances, the district court was on firm footing when it ruled that Twitter had not substantially and in good faith complied with the warrant.” Pan added that Twitter also didn’t object to the sanctions formula at the time.

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