Twitter Inc., now rebranded as X, was fined $350,000 for defying a judge’s deadline to comply with a Justice Department search warrant for records related to Donald Trump’s social media account, according to a courtThe ruling revealed that Special Counsel John “Jack” Smith’s office obtained the warrant as part of its investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
In the 3-0 opinion, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit rejected Twitter’s objections to the nondisclosure order and upheld the fine against the company.
A spokesperson for Smith declined to comment on the opinion. A representative of X didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. The district judge who signed off on it — US District Judge Beryl Howell, then the DC court’s chief judge — found probable cause at the time to search the account “for evidence of criminal offenses.”
The company maintained that it shouldn’t have to comply with the warrant until that issue was fully litigated. The judge adopted the government’s proposal for how to calculate the sanctions — $50,000 per day of noncompliance, doubling that rate every additional day — and pointed out that the company had been sold to Elon Musk for more than $40 billion and that Musk’s net worth was more than $180 billion at the time.