X, formerly known as Twitter, was fined $350,000 for defying a judge’s deadline to comply with a Justice Department search warrant for records related to former President Trump’s account, according to a court opinion unsealed Wednesday.
The L-A Times reports the ruling revealed that special counsel Jack Smith’s office, which obtained the warrant as part of its investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, had asked a judge to bar X from revealing the warrant’s existence. Prosecutors argued that alerting the former president “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him an opportunity to destroy evidence or change his conduct.
In the 3-0 opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected X’s objections to the nondisclosure order and upheld the lower court judge’s civil contempt sanction. The opinion notes that X ultimately complied with the warrant.
Judge Florence Pan, who was appointed to the court by President Biden, wrote that prosecutors had offered “unquestionably compelling” reasons to stop X from notifying Trump about the search warrant, and that the government’s interests were “particularly strong” because of the subject of the investigation — efforts to undo “a valid national election.”
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