Newly unsealed court filings show some of what special counsel Jack Smith’s team was looking for when they got a search warrant ordering Twitter to hand over Donald Trump’s account information—and those same filings show U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell’s total lack of patience for Twitter’s arguments that it should be allowed to tell Trump about the warrant.
Politico summarizes the information the special counsel sought:
— Accounts associated with @realdonaldtrump that the former president might have used in 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
At one point a lawyer for Twitter did confirm that there were direct messages in Trump’s account.
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It’s pretty clear that Twitter dragged its feet on producing much of the information—or that its ability to produce information was hampered by understaffing in the wake of Elon Musk’s layoffs—prompting one of the federal prosecutors to say, “I don’t profess to be a technological wizard, but it does not seem to be a complex issue” to hit Control+F and look for IP addresses, email addresses, or phone numbers used by Trump’s account and other accounts.
But the actual most contentious issue was Twitter’s effort to fight the nondisclosure order for Trump specifically, and Howell repeatedly pressed Twitter’s outside counsel on that issue, asking, “Is it because the CEO wants to cozy up with the former president, and that’s why you’re here?” At another point, she demanded that Twitter produce documentation of other times it had gone to court to fight an NDO.
In a particularly blunt moment, Howell even asked, “Is this to make Donald Trump feel like he is a particularly welcomed new renewed user of Twitter?”
“Twitter has no interest other than litigation its constitutional rights,” WilmerHale attorney George Varghese, representing Twitter, responded. The main constitutional right Twitter claimed was the First Amendment right to talk to Trump about this. Howell was not having it.
“You don’t even know the half about the very warrant you are coming in here to delay the execution of,” she told Twitter’s lawyers. The prosecutors also emphasized that they had significant concerns about Trump learning about the warrant before it could be executed. “There actually are concrete cognizable reasons to think that: If the President had notice of these covert investigative steps, there would be actual harm and concern for the investigation, for the witnesses going forward,” prosecutor Gregory Bernstein said, warning, “there could be serious adverse consequences from the President finding out about this search warrant.”
There are two obvious possibilities about what underlaid this court battle: Either the special counsel’s office was pretty sure it would find something significant in Trump’s Twitter account, or this is what it looks like when the special counsel’s office is just going through the motions. Either way, Trump should be scared.