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Special counsel Jack Smith at the beginning of 2023 obtained a search warrant for the Twitter account of Donald Trump as part of his criminal investigation of the former president, an appeals court decision revealed Wednesday.
Twitter, now known as X, initially delayed production of the materials required by that warrant as it filed a court action seeking to block an order that it not disclose the existence of the warrant, the 34-page decision says.
The ruling by the U.S. Court Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit upheld a lower-court judge’s $350,000 contempt sanction on the social media company for failing to comply with the warrant until after a three-day deadline.
Smith’s office argued, and the lower-court judge agreed, that if Twitter notified Trump of the warrant’s existence it would put the investigation at risk and give him a chance to destroy evidence that was sought by the warrant.
Twitter was bought last year by Elon Musk, the billionaire who also heads Tesla, SpaceX. He recently renamed the company X.
Smith has obtained two indictments of Trump.
One, filed June in federal court in southern Florida, charges the former president with retaining classified documents after he left the White House, and trying to hide those records from government officials.
The second, filed last week in D.C. federal court, charges Trump with a fraudulent scheme to reverse his loss in the 2020 election to President Joe Biden
Trump was active on Twitter before the election, and in the weeks after it leading up to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol, which disrupted a joint session of Congress meeting to confirm Biden’s victory.
Trump used his Twitter account to promote his false claims of election fraud and to encourage supporters to visit Washington on Jan. 6, when he held a rally calling on lawmakers and then-Vice President Mike Pence to reject certification of the election results.
“Big protest in D.C. on January 6th,” Trump tweeted on Dec. 19, 2020, at 1:42 a.m. ET.
“Be there, will be wild!”
Smith’s office applied for and obtained the search warrant for Trump’s account on Jan.17.
The warrant “directed Twitter to produce data and records related to the ‘@realDonaldTrump’ Twitter account,” according to the appeals court ruling.
The special counsel at the same time obtained a non-disclosure order from a Washington, D.C., federal district court judge that “prohibited Twitter from disclosing the existence or contents of the search warrant to any person.”
“The district court found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses,” the decision noted.
“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,” the ruling says.
A spokesman for Smith declined to comment to CNBC on the ruling.
Spokesmen for X did not immediately respond to CNBC’s requests for comment
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