Iclal Turan
14 August 2023•Update: 15 August 2023
WASHINGTON
Former President Donald Trump on Monday slammed special counsel Jack Smith for obtaining a search warrant for his X account, the social media site formerly known as Twitter.
"How dare lowlife prosecutor, Deranged Jack Smith, break into my former Twitter account without informing me and, indeed, trying to completely hide this atrocity from me," Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
"What could he possibly find out that is not already known. Just like the early morning raid of Mar-a-Lago! Why isn’t the DOJ raiding Crooked Joe Biden, the most CORRUPT (and Incompetent!) President in the history of the United States?," he asked, in reference to FBI raid to his home in Florida as part of the classified documents investigation.
The company, formerly known as Twitter and now called X, was held in contempt of court and fined $350,000 for noncompliance with a court-ordered warrant regarding Trump's social media account on Wednesday.
The 34-page opinion by a three-judge panel with the US Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. disclosed that the special counsel obtained a search warrant for Trump's Twitter account in January regarding the ongoing criminal investigation regarding events from the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol riot and the peaceful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election won by Biden.
The documents spelled out the details of the directives handed down to Twitter by the court.
The findings showed that the company "delayed production of the materials required by the search warrant" and did not hand them over on time.
"Although Twitter ultimately complied with the warrant, the company did not fully produce the requested information until three days after a court-ordered deadline," according to the panel. "The district court thus held Twitter in contempt and imposed a $350,000 sanction for its delay."
Twitter argued in its appeal that the nondisclosure order violated the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act, that the district court should have stayed its enforcement of the search warrant until after Twitter's objections to the nondisclosure order were resolved and that the district court abused its discretion by holding Twitter in contempt and imposing the sanction.
The judges rejected Twitter's arguments.
