Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant for access to Donald Trump’s Twitter account in January, but was looking for non-public information from the account.
That non-public information was Trump’s direct messages, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reports, noting there were “many.” DMs are private.
Smith, who has already obtained indictments against Donald Trump for the ex-president’s removal and refusal to return classified documents and for the ex-president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, appears to have accessed an important resource.
“The special counsel was seeking Trump’s direct messages on Twitter, of which there were many, federal prosecutors and lawyers for Twitter revealed in newly unsealed transcripts from hearings about the search warrant,” Collins reported Tuesday evening.
Former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said, “I’m surprised that Trump had “many” direct messages. Given that he doesn’t use text and email, they could more directly reveal his intent than other evidence Jack Smith has.”
Experts have wondered why Smith would have wanted access to Trump’s Twitter account, which was suspended after the 2021 insurrection. Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in late 2022, has since reinstated Trump’s account, but the ex-president has not made any public posts on the social media site, now renamed X.
Noted technologist John Gruber last week when news broke that Smith had obtained a search warrant for Trump’s Twitter account wrote, “I’m keenly interested in what the search warrant was after. It wasn’t Trump’s tweets, which are public.”
“So the obvious conclusion: his direct messages. Trump, famously, does not use email and, until this year, apparently didn’t use text messaging either. But did he send or receive DMs on Twitter? And was he stupid enough to put anything incriminating in them?”
“We also know,” Gruber continued, “that ‘deleted’ tweets were just hidden, not actually deleted — and a bug resulted in deleted tweets resurfacing. Was that (or is it still) true for ‘deleted’ direct messages as well? I think it’s quite likely that every single DM ever sent on Twitter is still around.”
A filing had said “the court ‘found probable cause to search the Twitter account for evidence of criminal offenses,’” according to an Associated Press report last week.
Image by Gage Skidmore via Flickr and a CC license