According to a court decision that was released on Wednesday, Twitter Inc., now known as X, was fined $350,000 for failing to immediately cooperate with a Justice Department search demand for documents pertaining to former President Donald Trump’s account.
The ruling states that in the middle of January, the office of Special Counsel John “Jack” Smith secured a search warrant for information and other documents connected to Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account. It requested the gag order, claiming that providing Trump knowledge of the warrant “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him the chance to obliterate evidence or act in a different way.
Trump is being prosecuted by Smith for attempting to rig the 2020 election results. Twitter’s challenges to a ruling that forbade the firm from informing anyone about the warrant were denied by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. According to the ruling, Twitter eventually complied with the warrant linked to Smith’s criminal inquiry.
The battle had mostly taken place behind closed doors until Wednesday, when the DC Circuit ordered that a redacted copy of its July 18 opinion be made public. The decision demonstrates that a three-judge panel unanimously upheld both the civil contempt penalty and the lower court judge’s decision upholding the nondisclosure order.
Smith’s representative declined to address the viewpoint. Twitter had contended that the nondisclosure order went against the First Amendment’s safeguards for free speech and that it shouldn’t be required to abide by the warrant until that question had been resolved in court.
Twitter must comply by February 7 after a district court judge ruled against the business. Twitter missed the deadline and didn’t turn in the documents until the evening of February 9, which resulted in financial penalties.
Judge Florence Pan, Judge J. Michelle Childs, and Judge Nina Pillard, all appointed by President Joe Biden, were on the DC Circuit panel. Judge Nina Pillard was chosen by former President Barack Obama. Pan penned the viewpoint. The case number is 23-5044, District of Columbia Circuit, US Court of Appeals.
