Remember when Donald Trump tweeted? Of course you do! The 45th president commanded the world’s attention one 280-character post at a time, until he was suspended from the platform two and a half years ago. He used the platform to troll, harass, and lie. He amplified conspiracy theorists and their views. He antagonized volatile nuclear world powers and told election deniers about a January 6 protest on the National Mall: “Be there, will be wild!” And that’s just what we, the public, could see.
Earlier today, an unsealed court opinion revealed that prosecutors working for Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a search warrant in January to access the now-dormant account of @realDonaldTrump, perhaps in order to learn what, if anything, went on behind the scenes—in messages or drafts that users can’t see. According to the opinion, the warrant “directed Twitter to produce data and records related” to Trump’s account. The company initially refused to comply, because the warrant contained a clause prohibiting Twitter from notifying Trump that the government had issued the warrant. After being held in contempt of court and fined $350,000, Twitter ultimately handed over the information.
According to experts I spoke with, the warrant appears straightforward, and the nondisclosure element is common enough in criminal investigations where prosecutors are worried about evidence being destroyed or mishandled. (Had Trump been alerted, he might have deleted whatever Smith was hoping to find.) It’s worth noting that Twitter frequently receives and sometimes complies with government requests for information. An April report by Rest of World revealed that, under Elon Musk’s ownership, the company “received 971 government demands, and fully complied with 808 of them.” Of course, Trump’s is no ordinary Twitter account, and the charges against the former president—regarding the handling of classified material as well as alleged attempts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power—are extraordinary.
“Going to online accounts for evidence of conspiracies is very common,” Orin Kerr, a law professor at UC Berkeley, told me. “If you put aside the astounding fact that this is happening to a former president, it makes sense. They’re investigating a crime, and he was certainly using Twitter a lot.”
Smith’s warrant raises all sorts of questions about what the special counsel might be looking for, and what the prosecutors might see while accessing the former president’s account.
Will investigators comb through Trump’s direct messages? Is there useful information to be gleaned from IP addresses associated with @realDonaldTrump? Prosecutors might also want to identify the specific device from which certain tweets were sent, in order to more tightly link them to Trump: Trump told Politico in 2019 that although he “generally” wrote his own tweets, his aide Dan Scavino sometimes helped.
“Ultimately, we just don’t know what Smith got,” Kerr said. “There’s some hint in the opinion that they were doing keyword searches, which could mean that prosecutors don’t have access to everything, but we just don’t know.”
Of course, there’s the voyeuristic curiosity of how one of the world’s most prolific and important tweeters used the app behind the scenes. Trump’s unsent tweet drafts could theoretically be used as evidence, although we simply don’t know whether Smith has them. Did Donald Trump, who was known to eschew most forms of digital communication, including email, and who only recently started texting, directly message people? If not, his direct-message inbox is likely not very interesting; Trump’s reinstated account has only 51 followers on the platform, most of them official accounts and family members, and has closed DMs, meaning outsiders can’t initiate contact unless the president follows them back.
There is, as Kerr noted, no guarantee that anything substantive will come from digging through Trump’s infamous account: “If there are no direct messages, there’s probably not a lot of evidence there.” And it’s entirely possible that prosecutors simply obtained the warrant to help submit Trump’s tweets as evidence in court: Creating an official chain of custody would remove doubt that any given tweet actually existed, if the question were raised down the line.
There’s a great deal about the search of Trump’s Twitter account that we don’t know and may never know about. It will not shock you to know that I am not an attorney—merely a Twitter-addled tech writer who has covered the platform for well over a decade. But I believe there is one indisputable lesson that any human being ought to take away from today’s news: Never tweet. (Especially if you think there’s even a small chance that you may end up in a situation where a federal prosecutor charges you with conspiring to defraud the government.) Should the special counsel find a smoking gun buried within the recesses of Trump’s account, its public excavation would be the direct result of more than a decade of Trump’s digital bloviating. His obsession with the platform led to this moment. It marks the evolution of Trump’s Twitter account, morphing from a curiosity into a weapon and, finally, into a legal target.