Elon Musk’s X Asks Supreme Court To Weigh In On Jack Smith’s Trump Search Warrant

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s battle with X, formerly Twitter, over a warrant for former President Donald Trump’s account reached the Supreme Court Tuesday.

U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Columbia Beryl Howell granted Smith’s request for a warrant in January 2023, along with a nondisclosure order prohibiting X from notifying anyone of the warrant’s existence. This allowed Smith access to data like draft tweets and direct messages as part of his investigation into Trump’s actions around Jan. 6.

The company argues that the precedent set by lower court rulings on the issue has “far-reaching” implications, allowing the government to “invade other privileges,” such as attorney-client or journalist-source, by “seeking communications from, and gagging, third parties.”

X’s delay in compliance while it fought the order on First Amendment grounds earned it a $350,000 sanction, which a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld.

“In an unprecedented end-run around executive privilege, Special Counsel Jack Smith obtained a nondisclosure order preventing Twitter from notifying former President Trump of a warrant for private communications that he sent and received during his presidency,” X’s petition states. “The courts below rejected Twitter’s First Amendment challenge to the nondisclosure order after ordering Twitter to produce the communications without affording the former President an opportunity to assert privilege over them.”

X asked the justices in its petition