Despite facing difficulties in obtaining former President Donald Trump’s records from Twitter (now X), the special counsel investigating the events of January 6th, 2020 eventually managed to acquire a substantial amount of information from the platform. However, according to recently unsealed court filings (PDF) disclosed by Politico, it required extensive negotiations and a significant amount of effort before the counsel could successfully obtain the requested data from Twitter. Apparently, the search warrant required Twitter to produce all tweets that @realdonaldtrump created, drafted, liked or retweeted, including any posts he eventually…

After court documents revealing the warrant emerged, Politico reported that special counsel Jack Smith has been authorized to search former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account as part of his inquiry into the events of January 6th, 2020. Smith received permission in January, but had trouble getting records from Twitter. First, his investigators apparently encountered a “defunct” website typically used to make legitimate requests to law enforcement. When they were able to provide the authorization, Twitter was slow to respond, according to court records. According to recently unsealed court documents, the…