Twitter Fined for Failing To Quickly Turn Over Trump Data to Jack Smith

Plus: A warning about trigger warnings, Biden blocks uranium mining near Grand Canyon, and more…

ELIZABETH NOLAN BROWN

Subpoenaing social media records for law enforcement purposes isn’t in itself problematic, of course. But there are potentially troubling elements to Smith’s investigative demands and process in this case.

At this point, Trump’s account had been reinstated by Twitter and was once again viewable by the public.

I’m not sure exactly what could be gleaned from location and time-stamp data from Trump’s tweets, but I’ll grant that there could be information important to the indictment in there. However, seeking to see who engaged with Trump’s tweets or the identities of accounts that reposted them raises more red flags. What could federal prosecutors possibly need with information like that?

Granted, the kinds of information Smith sought are speculative at this point. What’s not speculative is the secretive process by which Smith’s subpoenaing of Twitter played out.

“The government also obtained a nondisclosure agreement that had prohibited Twitter from disclosing the search warrant,” reports the A.P. So, Twitter was not allowed to even reveal—publicly or to Trump—that federal prosecutors were requesting records at all.

“The court found that disclosing the warrant could risk that Trump could jeopardize the ongoing investigation by giving him ‘an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior’ or notify his allies,” notes the A.P.

But Smith was very publicly appointed to investigate Trump back in November 2022. By mid-January 2023, when Smith obtained the Twitter search warrant, Trump had already long known that he was under investigation—which makes the idea that this was about stopping Trump from destroying evidence seem suspect.

It’s this nondisclosure order that riled up the folks at Twitter, per the A.P.:

Twitter said if it had to turn over the records before the judge assessed the legality of the nondisclosure agreement, it would prevent Trump “from asserting executive privilege to shield communications made using his Twitter account,” the document says.

Details about the search warrant and Twitter’s response were kept under seal for months but recently came out in a July appeals court decision unsealed Wednesday. The appeals court rejected Twitter’s arguments that the nondisclosure order violated the First Amendment and the Stored Communications Act, that the district court shouldn’t have enforced the search warrant until resolving Twitter’s objections, and that Twitter shouldn’t have been found in contempt and sanctioned.

FREE MINDS

To a certain degree, Friedman said, this represented a positive change. Mental illness was becoming less stigmatized than ever before, and seeking care was more common. But Friedman worried that students also saw themselves as fragile, and seemed to believe that coming into contact with offensive or challenging information was psychologically detrimental. In asking for more robust warnings about potentially upsetting classroom material, the students seemed to be saying: This could hurt us, and this institution owes us protection from distress.

Trigger warnings were only one part of a larger shift. Complaints quickly entered the wider culture, and were applied to “toxic” workplaces and “problematic” colleagues; students decried the “potential trauma” caused by ideas and objected to the presence of some speakers and works of art.

My own doubts about all of this came, ironically, from reporting on trauma. I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it.

Feminist writers were trying to make our little corner of the internet a gentler place, while also giving appropriate recognition to appallingly common female experiences that had been pushed into the shadows. To some extent, those efforts worked. But as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?

FREE MARKETS

Designating this area as a national monument will protect “landscape sacred to Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples and advance President Biden’s historic climate and conservation agenda,” said the White House in a statement.

The Biden administration has portrayed the decision as a small trade-off, saying the area contains just 1.3 percent of known U.S. uranium reserves. But critics of Biden’s decision say it will further U.S. reliance on foreign uranium from places like Russia.

“President Biden and his radical advisers won’t be satisfied until the entire federal estate is off limits and America is mired in dependency on our adversaries for our natural resources,” said Rep. Bruce Westerman (R–Ark.) in a statement.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board called the designation “a gift to Putin,” writing that the land in question “includes America’s only source of high-grade uranium ore that is economically competitive on the global market.” At present, “the U.S. imports about 95% of uranium used for nuclear power reactors, mostly from Kazakhstan, Canada, Russia and Australia,” the Journal points out.

The Journal editorial board also pushes back against the idea that uranium mining in the area would contaminate local waters and wildlife. “A U.S. Geological Survey in 2021 found springs and wells in the region met federal drinking-water standards despite decades of uranium mining,” it states.

It also warns that the designation is just one part of a larger push “to block all mining in the U.S.”—even though this “means mining will occur in countries with fewer environmental protections”—and of an overly expansive reading of the president’s power under the Antiquities Act of 1906, which lets presidents designate federal land for national monuments. “Environmental groups even argue that Presidents can’t roll back predecessors’ designation,” the board writes. “This interpretation of one-way executive power is more sweeping than the Grand Canyon and is crying out for a legal challenge.”

QUICK HITS

• The House Judiciary Committee is seeking more information about FBI efforts to investigate “violent extremists in radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology.” While the FBI “cast it as the work of a single rogue field office…it looks like the effort was more widespread than our G-men admitted to the public,” notes The Wall Street Journal.

• “The U.S. State Department encouraged the Pakistani government in a March 7, 2022, meeting to remove Imran Khan as prime minister over his neutrality on the Russian invasion of Ukraine,” reports The Intercept, which obtained a classified Pakistani government document about the meeting. “The cable, known internally as a ‘cypher,’ reveals both the carrots and the sticks that the State Department deployed in its push against Khan, promising warmer relations if Khan was removed, and isolation if he was not.”

• “NIMBYs have throttled the supply of homes across the country. In Montana, the state government was not just paying attention but primed to do something about it,” notes Annie Lowrey at The Atlantic. That included transforming its land-use policies and allowing dense development—policies it ushered in “on a bipartisan basis and at warp speed.” And the result may have been enough “to fix its housing crisis,” writes Lowrey.

• How Biden is escalating the trade war with China.

• Nick Gillespie talks to Tara Isabella Burton, author of Self-Made: Creating Our Identities From Da Vinci to the Kardashians.

Since starting at Reason in 2014, Brown has won multiple awards for her writing on the U.S. government’s war on sex. Brown’s writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, Playboy, Fox News, Politico, The Week, and numerous other publications. You can follow her on Twitter @ENBrown.

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