The Biden administration seems to love attacking the First Amendment. The latest example is that the Biden Justice Department’s Special Counsel Jack Smith served a search warrant on Donald Trump’s Twitter account — and prohibited the company from disclosing that warrant to anyone, even Trump himself.
Twitter, now known as X Corp., objected that the nondisclosure order violated the First Amendment. Indeed, Twitter/X appealed a court decision and the $350,000 fine it paid after first delaying the release of the information that Smith wanted and finally fulfilling the request several days late. Unfortunately for X, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the previous holding and fine in a unanimous decision Wednesday, according to the New York Post.
The social media company had argued that an order prohibiting the company from either notifying anyone about the existence of the search warrant or what was sought by it violated the First Amendment, and that the lower court judge should have waited to enforce the warrant until the objection was dealt with.
A copy of the ruling that columnist and attorney Jonathan Turley shared recounted Twitter’s protest of the nondisclosure as violating both the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act. Twitter also argued that the “district court abused its discretion by holding Twitter in contempt and imposing the sanction.” As noted above, the new ruling sided with the previous court decision, not Twitter.
Not even Donald Trump was informed of the search warrant for his Twitter account, which was part of an ongoing and highly controversial Department of Justice (DOJ) probe into the former president. Jack Smith’s investigation has so far resulted in three indictments against Trump, which have been slammed as bogus or partisan election interference by some Republicans.
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The new court ruling states:
On January 17, 2023, the government applied for, and obtained, a search warrant that directed Twitter to produce data and records related to the “@realDonaldTrump” Twitter account. At the same time, the government applied for, and obtained, a nondisclosure order, which prohibited Twitter from disclosing the existence or contents of the search warrant to any person.
The district court claimed “probable cause” to search Trump’s Twitter for “evidence of criminal offenses.” It also ruled that informing Trump of the search warrant would supposedly “seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him the opportunity to “destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates.” The new ruling did not explain whether there was any actual evidence to suggest that Trump might engage in such problematic behavior.
PJ Media recently published a series of exclusives on allegations of Jack Smith’s previous prosecutorial misconduct.
Will secretive search warrants ever be served on Joe Biden’s social media accounts as more and more evidence comes out on his corruption? Probably not. The weaponized DOJ seems interested in protecting the Bidens while going after Donald Trump as hard as it possibly can.
