The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge filed by Elon Musk’s X platform to rulings that forced it to turn over data on former President Donald Trump’s X account to special counsel Jack Smith.
In 2023, Smith obtained a warrant for Trump’s Twitter account as part of federal prosecutors’ 2020 election case against the former president. Trump had frequently used the account during the 2016 presidential campaign and during his first administration.
The high court on Monday rendered its decision without any comment. There were no noted dissents.
The Musk-owned platform had initially refused to comply with a nondisclosure order and was fined $350,000 by a judge in August 2023, records show. At the time, the court had rejected X’s claim that it should not have been held in contempt or sanctioned.
Smith’s team repeatedly mentioned Trump’s posts on Twitter in the first indictment, which was unsealed last year. A revised indictment was brought against Trump by Smith in September after the Supreme Court separately ruled in July that presidents should be declared broadly immune from prosecution for their official acts and duties. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all the charges in the case.
Prosecutors obtained the search warrant on Jan. 17, 2023, directing Twitter to produce information on Trump’s account after a court “found probable cause to search the account for evidence of criminal offenses,” according to last year’s court ruling. The government also obtained a nondisclosure agreement that had prohibited Twitter from disclosing the search warrant, the filing says.
“Although Twitter had provided these communications to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the government informed Twitter and the district court that it ‘did not want to obtain data from NARA, as it would require notification [to the former President] pursuant to the Presidential Records Act,'” the petition said.
In trying to bolster its case before the Supreme Court, X had said its petition was designed to allow the court to uphold the First Amendment.
“The potential consequences are far-reaching,” the company said. “Twitter alone annually receives thousands of nondisclosure orders attached to demands for user information. Indeed, the D.C. Circuit agreed that this issue is likely to recur for Twitter. Other platforms, too, receive thousands of requests for user information—many with nondisclosure orders.”
“The First Amendment did not justify petitioner’s refusal to comply” with the special counsel’s warrant “before litigating its separate challenge to the nondisclosure order,” the government wrote, adding that X is trying to assert a “right to immediate resolution of its First Amendment claim to interests.”
Arguing that the Fourth Amendment allows the government to get a warrant to “search property belonging to an innocent third party,” Smith’s office suggested that the warrant for X “is supported by probable cause that ‘evidence of a crime will be found.'”
Monday is the Supreme Court’s first day back from its summer break. The nine justices are now scheduled to hear major cases from now until around June 2025.
