The Supreme Court reported that it will not decide on an appeal filed by X, Elon Musk’s company. In doing so, the court evades issuing its opinion on whether special counsel Jack Smith violated the First Amendment when he obtained a search warrant for former President Donald Trump’s Twitter messages and then barred the company from disclosing this to Trump.
“The justices have sidestepped another high-profile legal battle arising from the special counsel’s prosecution of the former president for allegedly attempting to subvert the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election,” wrote CBS, which obtained the court decision.
X had asked the Supreme Court to consider whether social networking companies can be compelled to turn over a user’s communications to the government while they are prohibited from notifying the user about it.
In that regard, CBS recalled, the company said the confidentiality order deprived the former president of the opportunity to invoke executive privilege over the material before it was provided to the special counsel.
“But X said other users such as journalists, doctors or lawyers may want to invoke their own privileges and would not have the chance to,” CBS noted.
Joaquín Núñez
The legal battle dates back to 2023, when U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ordered the company to turn over the requested data to Smith. Howell barred the company from disclosing the court order to anyone for 180 days after determining that the government had reason to believe that notifying Trump would jeopardize its investigation.
“Twitter withheld the records while it challenged the nondisclosure order, which the company claimed violated its First Amendment right to communicate with Trump. But Howell ultimately concluded that the order was valid and imposed a $350,000 civil contempt sanction on the company because of its failure to hand over the records on time,” the news outlet highlighted.
