“If the Court does not grant this petition, it could be decades (if ever) before it gets another clean vehicle to resolve the important and recurring questions presented.”
The Supreme Court Monday said it won’t hear a court challenge from social media platform X to judicial rulings that ordered it to provide Donald Trump’s account data to Biden-Harris appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith in the election interference case. Early last year, Smith secretly used a search warrant to gain access to the account that Trump used extensively during his tenure as president, The Hill reported.
X was unable to tell Trump about the search warrant and only found out about it last summer when Trump was charged by Smith. Trump pleaded not guilty to four felonies. X challenged the search warrant, arguing Trump’s files were subject to executive privilege and being told to be silent about the data seizure amounted to a violation of the First Amendment protection of free speech. X was fined $350,000 for being judged as too tardy in providing Trump’s records.
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View on RumbleAfter lower courts rejected its appeal, X brought the case to the Supreme Court in the hopes that it would provide the justices with the opportunity to rule on the constitutionality of a social media platform being forced to deliver a private account. “If the Court does not grant this petition, it could be decades (if ever) before it gets another clean vehicle to resolve the important and recurring questions presented,” X wrote in its petition.
Seth Waxman, US solicitor general under former President Bill Clinton represented X while Smith’s team went with Michael Dreeben, who argued that the Supreme Court should ignore the appeal because Smith already had the file and that executive privilege did not pertain to the X account. “If review of the underlying legal issues were ever warranted, the Court should await a live case in which the issues are concretely presented,” prosecutors said.
The Supreme Court has sided with Trump in the same prosecution, deciding in July that as president, Trump enjoyed substantial immunity from criminal charges for official acts committed while in that office. Smith subsequently prepared a 165-page memo arguing the same case against Trump and charged him with a superseding indictment citing private acts.
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