Musk's Jack Smith Case Ends at Supreme Court

Justices won't take up appeal over order for Trump's Twitter data
By Bob Cronin,  Newser Staff
Posted Oct 7, 2024 6:25 PM CDT
Musk's Jack Smith Case Ends at Supreme Court
The Supreme Court building in June   (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

The Supreme Court will not be hearing an appeal by Elon Musk's X Corp. concerning special counsel Jack Smith's search warrant for data on Donald Trump's Twitter account. In declining to take up the case, the court noted no dissents and made no comments about it, CNN reports. So a lower court ruling in favor of prosecutors stands, allowing the Justice Department to keep using nondisclosure orders to keep social media providers and telecom companies from letting subscribers know there's a search warrant for their information, per Politico.

X maintained that Smith violated the First Amendment when he sought Trump's Twitter messages as part of an investigation into election interference and ordered the company not to tell the former president. Prosecutors say nondisclosure orders are necessary to protect evidence from being destroyed. Trump was not involved in the case, and Smith has the data he wanted anyway, though he only got it after a judge held Twitter in contempt for missing court-ordered deadlines to comply with prosecutors' requests, per Politico. X wanted the Supreme Court to take up the issue in general, saying nondisclosure orders could become a focus of future disagreements involving the government. (More Twitter stories.)

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