In the investigation against former US President Donald Trump, Twitter was late in handing over internal documents – and has now received a fine. An appeals court upheld a federal judge’s ruling that fined the company $350,000 for disobeying an order.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, who also investigated Trump’s role in the storming of the Capitol in January 2021, wanted to take his Twitter account into account. As can be seen from the now published court document, in January a court approved Smith’s request for data and information: Smith had found “reasonable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal activity”. However, Twitter hesitated, took legal action against the instruction and finally only delivered the complete data several days after the deadline had expired. What exactly they contain is not known.
The federal judge justified the fine by saying that the company did not want to comply with the requirement to keep the search of the account secret, and that he wanted to inform the ex-president. At the time, Twitter referred to the first amendment to the constitution, which among other things guarantees freedom of speech.
Trump: “Attack on my civil rights”
Trump said on his social network Truth Social that the Justice Department had “secretly attacked my Twitter account and was careful not to let me know about this major ‘attack’ on my civil rights.” X and Smith spokesmen did not respond to requests for comment from Reuters.
Trump supporters wanted to reverse his defeat in the presidential election by storming the Capitol. He made active use of the Twitter service, which has recently been called X. Trump’s tweets are publicly viewable. However, the company also has non-public information such as draft tweets, short messages sent only to certain people, location data and the type of device used to send tweets.
Trump has been charged in connection with the storming of the Capitol for over a week. He himself pleads “not guilty”. Next year he wants to return to the White House for the Republicans.