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A federal appeals court on Tuesday rejected Company X’s latest challenge to a confidentiality order it received as part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s search warrant on former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account.
Smith, formerly known as Twitter, was arrested in January 2023 as part of a criminal investigation into President Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss to President Joe Biden. For the first time, it issued a search warrant to Company X for Mr. Trump’s account data.
At the same time, Smith obtained a secrecy order prohibiting X from disclosing the search warrant to Trump or anyone else.
In granting Mr. Smith’s request to keep the warrant secret, the federal district court believed that disclosure of the request would “destroy or tamper with evidence, intimidate potential witnesses, or pose a significant risk to the investigation.” said that it is reasonable.
X initially refused to comply with the warrant, and the district court in Washington, D.C., charged the company with contempt and fined it $350,000. X eventually handed over the data Smith was seeking.
In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied X’s first appeal of the order.
In September, X requested a retrial in front of the full Court of Appeals judges (a step known as a “en banc” retrial), arguing that the previous decision was in error.
Heared before an 11-judge panel of the Court of Appeal, X’s challenge was again dismissed in Tuesday’s order.
However, four of the 11 judges, including three appointed by President Trump, strongly criticized the court for allowing Smith to secretly obtain a search warrant.
“We should not have supported this ploy,” a statement attached to the order said, rejecting X’s bid for a new hearing.
“Rather than following established precedent, for the first time in U.S. history, a court has granted access to presidential communications prior to scrutiny of executive privilege,” a statement written by Justice Neomi Rao said.
Mr. Rao argued that Mr. Smith’s efforts “obscured and circumvented claims of executive privilege and circumvented the careful balance Congress established in the Presidential Records Act.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Smith declined to comment on the court filing. Seth Waxman, the lead attorney representing X in the matter, did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
President Trump nominated Rao to the Court of Appeals in 2019. Mr. Rao’s statement was echoed by Judges Gregory Katsas and Justin Walker, also nominated by Mr. Trump, and Judge Karen LeCraft Henderson, appointed in 1990 by former President George H.W. Bush.
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