Elon Musk Fined $350k After Failing to Comply with Jack Smith Warrant Over Donald Trump's Twitter Account
Aug. 9 2023, Published 3:11 p.m. ET
Donald Trump's Twitter account was the subject of a search warrant issued by Special Counsel Jack Smith as part of his ongoing investigation into the former president's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, RadarOnline.com has learned.
In a surprising development to come after Trump was indicted and pleaded not guilty to four criminal charges connected to his alleged efforts to overturn the election last week, it was revealed Smith’s team issued Elon Musk a search warrant for Trump’s Twitter account in January.
Twitter – now known as X – initially delayed complying with the warrant as it sought to block an order that prevented the social media company from disclosing the existence of the warrant to Trump, according to CNBC.
After Twitter completed the production of Trump's account information for Smith's office on February 9, the appeals court upheld a lower-court judge's $350,000 contempt sanction against the social media company for failing to comply with the warrant within the three-day deadline.
Smith's office argued that notifying Trump of the warrant's existence would have jeopardized the investigation and given him the chance to tamper with or destroy evidence.
Twitter appealed the contempt ruling and the non-disclosure order. Musk reportedly cited the company’s First Amendment rights to communicate with its subscriber, Trump, about the warrant.
The court also addressed Twitter's concern that being "kept in the dark" about the warrant would prevent Trump from asserting executive privilege to shield his communications made through his Twitter account from prosecutors.
Twitter argued that the non-disclosure order violated the federal Stored Communications Act.
However, the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit unanimously ruled against the company on all counts.
As RadarOnline.com previously reported, this latest development comes after Smith issued two indictments against Trump.
The first, filed in June in federal court in southern Florida, accused the former president of retaining classified documents and trying to hide them from government officials after leaving office in January 2021.
The second indictment, filed last week in D.C. federal court, charged Trump with a fraudulent scheme to reverse his loss in the 2020 election to then-candidate Joe Biden.
Trump's use of Twitter before and after the election was a major topic of scrutiny – particularly because the former president infamously used the platform to promote his false claims of election fraud and to rally his supporters to Washington on January 6, 2021.
“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump wrote in one tweet published on December 19, 2020. “Be there, will be wild!”
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The search warrant for Trump's Twitter account was reportedly obtained by Smith's office on January 17 of this year, and it was issued in connection to Smith’s investigation into Trump's actions immediately after the 2020 election.
The warrant specifically “directed Twitter to produce data and records related to the ‘@realDonaldTrump’ Twitter account,” according to the appeals court ruling from earlier this year.
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