excalibur
Diamond Member
- Mar 19, 2015
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Lying to a court seems to be part of Jack Smith's MO.
And a rubber-stamping judge is all he needs to claim anything and get whatever he seeks. That is the corruption of both Justice and the courts.
That is not a nation any of us should want.
And a rubber-stamping judge is all he needs to claim anything and get whatever he seeks. That is the corruption of both Justice and the courts.
That is not a nation any of us should want.
They claimed if the government got his direct messages, he would flee the country.
âTheyâ are Special Counsel Jack Smith and D.C. District Court Judge Beryl Howell. âHe,â of course, is former President Donald Trump.
Taking advantage of an undoubtedly hectic time a few months after Elon Musk finalized his purchase of Twitter in October 2022, the Department of Justice attempted to serve the company with a court-ordered search warrant seeking all records related to Donald Trumpâs Twitter account. But Smithâwho has unlimited resources, a large staff of experienced attorneys and investigators, and an (unjustified) reputation among the expert legal class as a by-the-book prosecutorâdidnât do it the old-fashioned way.
One of Smithâs associates apparently filed the search warrant on Twitterâs website under its âlegal requestsâ page on January 17. But that didnât work. So they tried again two days later, leaving an unprecedented search warrant on a former president of the United States in some randoâs inbox. Hearing no responseâno duhâSmithâs office on January 25 contacted Twitterâs legal counsel, who informed the government she hadnât heard anything about the warrant.
And Smithâs response basically wasâtoo bad. Twitter, Smith warned, had two days to produce the data or else.
Those are just a few of the juicy details contained in a newly released 34-page appellate ruling upholding Howellâs order to force Twitter to hand over everything on Trumpâs Twitter account including direct messages, drafts, and possibly deleted tweets. Smith convinced Howellânot a heavy lift for a judge who continues to issue landmark rulings against Trump including piercing attorney-client privilege between the former president and his private lawyerâthat the DOJ needed Trumpâs private Twitter archive as part of its investigation into efforts âto alter the outcome of a valid national election for the leadership of the Executive Branch of the federal government...and [to assess] whether that activity crossed lines into criminal culpability."
But that wasnât all that Smith and Howell, an Obama appointee who served as the D.C. districtâs chief judge until a few months ago, demanded of the social media companyâs new ownership. A nondisclosure order accompanied the search warrant, meaning Twitter could not notify its user, Donald Trump, about the legal proceedings for 180 days.
The basis for the nondisclosure order, Smith and Howell apparently argued in filings and hearings still under seal, was the Storage Communications Act. A provision in the Act allows a judge to instruct service providers not to disclose the existence of a warrant based on five potential harms: endangering the life or physical safety of an individual; flight from prosecution; destruction of or tampering with evidence; intimidation of potential witnesses; or otherwise seriously jeopardizing an investigation or unduly delaying a trial.
At some pointâand again, we may never know since the entire case file is under seal with the exception of the appellate court decisionâSmith warned that Trump was a flight risk in order to meet the Actâs nondisclosure requirements. Howell concurred, stating that she also âfound reason to believe that the former President would âflee from prosecution,ââ according to a footnote in the appellate courtâs opinion.
The footnote also disclosed that Smith had âerrantly included flight from prosecution as a predicateâ in seeking the nondisclosure order. (Misleading a court is just fine if you are Jack Smith.)
And as if to rescue Howell from her own absurd accusation that one of the most famous men in the world would hop on his golden jetliner to escape to some Godforsaken land upon learning a creepy special counsel and his creepy investigators would be reading his Twitter activity from three years ago, the appellate panel insisted Howell âdid not rely on risk of flight in [her] ultimate analysis.â
Sure.
The Sloppy, Dirty, Secret Grab of Trump's DMs
Working with the Obama-appointed chief judge of D.C. federal court, Special Counsel Jack Smith squeezed Twitter for Trump's data and a hefty fine for contempt. Both claimed Trump was a flight risk.
www.declassified.live