Why Elon Musk Fought a Federal Search Warrant to Help Trump [View all]
Source: Daily Beast
Why Elon Musk Fought a Federal Search Warrant to Help Trump
Twitter, owned by Musk, fought for months for the right to tell Trump about Special Counsel Jack Smith’s search warrant for his account.
Shan Wu
Published Aug. 10, 2023 2:07PM EDT
Forget the purported MMA cage match between Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, the owner of the social media company formerly known as Twitter, now known as X. The real action is the fight between Musk and Special Counsel Jack Smith over former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account—which took place in secret for months.
Musk was ultimately forced to submit to the search warrant, and also had to pay hundreds of thousands in court-ordered fines.
According to a just unsealed D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals opinion, the special counsel obtained a court-approved search warrant for Trump’s @RealDonald Trump Twitter account in January 2023 as part of the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election—but Twitter fought a court battle arguing it had a First Amendment right to tell Trump about the search warrant.
As is common in law enforcement investigations, the warrant was accompanied by a non-disclosure order which required Twitter to refrain from telling the subject of the search—Trump—about the existence of the warrant, so as to guard against potential destruction of evidence.
Twitter challenged the constitutionality of the order, arguing that it had a First Amendment right to tell Trump about the warrant.
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Read more: https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-elon-musk-fought-a-federal-search-warrant-to-help-trump
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