Special Counsel Obtained Trump Twitter DMs: Court Filings

Federal prosecutors investigating former President Donald Trump and his involvement in trying to overturn the 2020 election used a search warrant to gain access to direct messages the former president sent from his now-suspended @realDonaldTrump Twitter account, court filings revealed on Tuesday.

A federal grand jury in Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation into the events leading up to the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, indicted Trump on four felony counts related to his involvement. The former president pleaded not guilty to the charges and maintains that the election was stolen and he is innocent. The indictment did not mention any private communications with the president.

According to court filings, the direct messages from the account were obtained after legal battles with Twitter attorneys in January and February.

It has not been confirmed who the author of the direct messages is and what content they contained, but Trump was well known to be cautious with written correspondence.

"It seemed beyond comprehension that there weren’t communications regarding the account when it was suspended and terminated, but that doesn’t mean government officials at least cabined to that," prosecutor Tom Windom said, according to court transcripts obtained by CNN. "It can mean campaign officials. It can be anybody acting on behalf of the user of the account, or the user of the account himself."

The warrant, which was executed on the Twitter account in January, directed the social media company to turn over "all direct messages, the DMs," including those that have been sent, received, or "stored in draft form."

The release of the court transcripts comes just a week after it was revealed the special counsel had obtained a search warrant on the former president's Twitter account, which was first reported by CNN.

When the special counsel's office obtained the warrant, signed by a judge in Washington D.C., prosecutors received permission to force Twitter not to inform Trump that they were sharing his communications on the app.

The court documents said that if the former president learned about the search warrant it "would result in destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses or serious jeopardy to this investigation."

Twitter, now known as X, challenged the order claiming it was a violation of their First Amendment rights and the Stored Communications Act to ask them not to communicate with a user. The social media company also sought to delay the execution of the search warrant until the nondisclosure provision was resolved.

However, the company lost the challenge and was found in contempt of court for not handing over the contents of Trump's account on time, forcing them to pay a $350,000 fine.

The order was later amended, allowing the company to notify the former president about the existence and content of the search warrant, but required them not to reveal the case agent in charge of the investigation.