Twitter got hit with a $350,000 fine earlier this year after refusing to comply with a search warrant for former President Trump’s Twitter account that Jack Smith’s office obtained.
I gotta boogie, but two things:
mErrIcK tHe mEEk and the symbol of Garland haters.
When thinking about Trump, DeSantis, Musk, and all their ilk, it is wise to consider:
"So the fool, as distinct from the scoundrel, is completely self-satisfied; in fact, he can easily become dangerous, as it does not take much to make him aggressive. A fool must therefore be treated more cautiously than a scoundrel." – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Well golly gee, I wonder why our Elon has become so much more rapidly enamored of the Reich Wing who obey their version of the Golden Rule (ask if you don’t happen to know kiddies!).
Since Prince Elon makes people log in, here’s the whole mess of the thread from another source: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1689317800714682368.html
Elon broke twitter.
Pg 5 of the decision:
The government faced difficulties when it first attempted
to serve Twitter with the warrant and nondisclosure order. On
January 17, 2023, the government tried to submit the papers
through Twitter’s website for legal requests, only to find out
that the website was inoperative. Two days later, on January
19, 2023, the government successfully served Twitter through
that website. On January 25, 2023, however, when the
government contacted Twitter’ s counsel to check on the status
of Twitter’ s compliance, Twitter’ s counsel stated that she “had
not heard anything about [the] [w]arrant.”
Aw shit. Another short-fingered vulgarian.
Whoa. This was in a Hill article linked in a Political Wire post about this:
And buried in a footnote, the court says the lower court “also found reason to believe that the former President would ‘flee from prosecution.’”
Did Smith get the DM’s too?
Employing a lot of guesswork, informed by decades of dealing with the mad dog lawyers representing batshit client mindset, I strongly suspect Twitter initially gave up his public Tweets and then pretended to have no idea the warrant encompassed DM’s. Also suspect that Musk had looked at those DM’s and wanted to leverage a heads up into Trump returning to Twitter, but at least allowed himself to be talked down by his lawyers, which is novel. But then, he’d just had a 44 billion dollar lesson on why it’s stupid to ignore your lawyers that may still have been fresh enough to inform his actions.
Clearly he didn’t tell Trump, because Trump is only dropping panic stricken screeds about the warrant today.
Oh, also, Trump had DM’s and DoJ’s had them since February, y’all.
Oh God please let Trump have thought DMs were a good communication channel for people wanting to avoid government retention policies…
“I don’t want anybody looking through my Twitter DMs. I really don’t.”
Are you kidding? He talked to foreign leaders on an unsecured cellphone despite being warned that every intelligence service in the world with agents working under diplomatic cover in their embassies, was listening in and recording. Of course he DM’d and DM’d back.
Not clear to me whether it was broken deliberately or it broke for lack of maintenance. But little doubt Musk ordered in-house counsel to ignore everything that came to it.
It’s starting to look like Elon Musk may become the new Charles Koch.
He’s myopically greedy and utterly obsessed with reconfiguring society to comport with his own fetishes. He has no respect for other people, either as individuals, or in general.
Of course, he utterly lacks the discipline and focus that the Kochs are famous for, by which they purchased the Supreme Court and half the Senate. But Musk has way more money, direct control over the public square*, and is logically the greatest beneficiary of Koch’s now-completed quest to make economic power synonymous with political power.
So it’s not going to be a seamless transition by any means. But when Koch and Murdoch finally go the way of all flesh, Musk will be standing there with his enormous wallet and mouth ready to support anybody who seeks to weaken democracy – exactly like Charles “unite with anybody to do right” Koch.
This is why we need to always be mindful of getting Circuit Court Judges in the pipeline, and then get them approved, whenever, and wherever we (Democrats) are in charge. And fight like hell with Republicans when they block them.
Did any of the information in Smith’s search warrant concerning the “Dates” covered get reported here? I couldn’t find it, but didn’t have lots of time. I hope they go back to November election results and December of 2020 through to well after the Inauguration of Biden. And the subject matter included documents removed from WH as well as the usual criming and insurrecting…
