Jack Smith got a sealed search warrant on Donald Trump’s Twitter account

I remember being on Twitter on the afternoon and evening of January 6th, 2021. The MAGA terrorists had forced their way into the Capitol and many congressmen, senators and staffers had been evacuated, but some were still in bunkers or in lockdown in their offices. There were terrorists openly hunting for Speaker Pelosi, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats. Republicans began applying pressure on Donald Trump to do or say something to get his terrorists to stand down. He refused to say anything publicly for hours. Then he started tweeting encouragement to the terrorists and actively inciting more violence and more crime. Suddenly, Twitter started deleting his tweets and monitoring his account so that they could take down tweets as soon as he made them. This was happening for hours, and Trump tried tweeting from other accounts and Twitter deleted those too. That was finally when Trump’s Twitter account was suspended.

I’ve wondered, in the years since, if we would ever learn what Trump was trying to tweet out to his terrorist mob, tweets which were caught by the Twitter monitors before they were even published. Looks like DOJ’s Special Council Jack Smith wondered the same thing.

Prosecutors working for Jack Smith, the special counsel who has twice brought indictments against former President Donald J. Trump, obtained a search warrant early this year for Mr. Trump’s long-dormant Twitter account as part of their inquiry into his attempt to overturn the 2020 election, according to court papers unsealed on Wednesday.

The warrant, which was signed by a federal judge in Washington in January after Elon Musk took over Twitter, now called X, is the first known example of prosecutors directly searching Mr. Trump’s communications and adds a new dimension to the scope of the special counsel’s efforts to investigate the former president.

The court papers, which emerged from an appeal by Twitter challenging a part of the judge’s decision to issue the warrant, did not reveal what prosecutors were looking for in Mr. Trump’s Twitter account, which the tech company shut down for nearly two years soon after the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But the papers indicate that prosecutors received permission from the judge not to tell Mr. Trump for months that they had obtained the warrant for his account. The prosecutors feared that if Mr. Trump learned about the warrant, it “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior [or] notify confederates,” the papers said.

Mr. Trump quickly responded to the news about the warrant on his own social media site, Truth Social. “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,” he wrote. “My Political Opponent is going CRAZY trying to infringe on my Campaign for President.”

[From The NY Times]

Politico had more information on the search warrant and how Elon Musk refused to comply with the order initially. The court levied a $350,000 fine on Twitter/Musk for their three-day delay in complying with the search warrant. The opinion was sealed until now. Meaning, I think, that Jack Smith now has all of Twitter’s digital records of what they deleted on January 6th. I would imagine that Smith would probably be able to speak to the people, the actual living humans, who were tasked with monitoring his account on that day as well. Another interesting part of this is the gag order and secrecy – apparently, Elon Musk wanted to “warn” Trump that Jack Smith was looking through his Twitter files but the federal court said no. This was around the same time that Musk reinstated Trump’s account too.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Avalon Red.