Trump loses bid to keep special counsel from combing through his Twitter account ahead of Jan. 6 case

A federal appeals court spurned a request Tuesday to reconsider its ruling giving special counsel Jack Smith’s team access to former President Donald Trump’s X account, including his direct messages.

X had sought to block prosecutors from obtaining that information, but a three-judge panel rejected that request in July.

The company pleaded with the full US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to rehear the matter, which the court declined to do Tuesday.

“Upon consideration of appellant’s petition for rehearing en banc, the response thereto, the amicus curiae brief filed by Electronic Frontier Foundation in support of rehearing en banc, and the absence of a request by any member of the court for a vote, it is ordered that the petition be denied,” the court wrote.

The four conservative judges on the 11-member bench indicated they would have granted the en banc review.

“Smith directed a search warrant at Twitter and obtained a nondisclosure order that prevented Twitter from informing President Trump about the search,” the dissenting judges wrote.

“The district court and this court permitted this arrangement without any consideration of the consequential executive privilege issues raised by this unprecedented search.”

Smith’s team had lodged a subpoena against X in January last year for records stemming from Trump’s account on the platform.

Prosecutors sought the material to buttress the four-count 2020 election interference case pending against the 77-year-old.

X was slapped with at least $350,000 in fines for resisting the subpoena, court documents revealed. The company cried foul that it couldn’t apprise Trump of the situation.

X unsuccessfully argued before the three-judge panel that prohibiting it from notifying its user about a search warrant ran afoul of the First Amendment.

Ultimately, the company handed over the information to prosecutors, according to court records.

Before the three-judge panel took the case, a lower court judge determined that disclosing the warrant would give Trump an “opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates.”

Material obtained from Trump’s largely dormant account on the platform includes location data, draft posts, searches and more.

One of the judges noted that the trove of data “included 32 direct messages sent by President Trump.”

Once a serial Twitter poster, Trump has since used Truth Social as his preferred platform to unleash his various tirades and other thoughts.

The 45th president had been booted from X in the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, but was allowed to return after Tesla tycoon Elon Musk took over.