Elon Musk’s X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, was fined $350,000 for failing to immediately comply with a previously undisclosed Justice Department search warrant for records related to former President Donald Trump‘s account despite eventual compliance.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected the Big Tech company’s objections to an order that prevented the company from informing anyone about the warrant, according to a court opinion unsealed on Wednesday. Special counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant for Trump’s Twitter account on Jan. 17, 2023.
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“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 34-page decision. “The district court thus held Twitter in contempt and imposed a $350,000 sanction for its delay.”
The warrant was served with a “nondisclosure order” that blocked Twitter, now known as X, from notifying Trump about the warrant’s existence. X argued that the order violated the First Amendment and that the district court judge, Beryl Howell, should have blocked enforcement of the search warrant until the objection was resolved.
The court “found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses,” according to the opinion by Judge Florence Pan, a Biden appointee.
“Based on ex parte affidavits, the district court found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses,” the opinion stated. “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.'”
The decision did not include any information related to the affidavits cited in the decision, and it is not immediately clear whether the search warrant was looking for any private messages or unpublished posts by the former president.
Pan also wrote that the entire point of the nondisclosure order was to “avoid tipping off the former President about the warrant’s existence.” The other two judges on the panel were Michelle Childs and Cornelia Pillard, Biden and Obama appointees, respectively.
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Smith has charged Trump, in an indictment unsealed last week, with alleged attempts to subvert the 2020 election results. Trump has pleaded not guilty to charges including conspiracy to defraud the country and obstruction of Congress’s certification of the 2020 election results.
Trump has maintained he is innocent and has called Smith a “deranged” prosecutor while questioning the timing of the charges in the buildup to the 2024 presidential election. Trump’s legal team has signaled they will argue the former president was listening to advice from lawyers in his inner circle in 2020 and that he had the right to challenge the results of an election he believed was rigged.
