A federal appeals court declined on Tuesday to reconsider its decision to allow the government to execute a search warrant for information related to former President Donald Trump‘s Twitter account, prompting a stiff rebuke from at least four Republican-appointed judges.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit rejected Trump’s request on Tuesday to block special counsel Jack Smith from accessing his Twitter feed as part of his election interference case. A majority of the appeals court ruled to deny further review.
“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 ruling states.
U.S. Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, wrote that “the decisions in this case break with long-standing precedent and gut the constitutional protections for executive privilege.”
Rao said Smith’s approach to obtaining the warrant, which also included a nondisclosure order to keep Twitter from informing Trump about the search, “obscured and bypassed any assertion of executive privilege and dodged the careful balance Congress struck in the Presidential Records Act.”
“The district court and this court permitted this arrangement without any consideration of the consequential executive privilege issues raised by this unprecedented search,” Rao said, adding, “We should not have endorsed this gambit.”
Rao’s dissent was joined by two more Trump appointees, Judges Justin Walker and Greg Katsas. Judge Karen Henderson, an appointee of former President George H.W. Bush, also joined.
The dissent added that the options for the appeals court had become limited due to the nondisclosure order preventing Twitter from informing Trump, saying if Trump had known about the warrant, he “could have intervened to protect claims of executive privilege.”
“Rather than follow established precedent, for the first time in American history, a court allowed access to presidential communications before any scrutiny of executive privilege,” Rao said.
It is not clear whether Trump plans to appeal this matter to the Supreme Court.
Both a trial-level judge and a three-judge panel in the appeals court previously held that revealing the Twitter search to Trump or his representatives could hurt the grand jury investigation.
The case at hand focused on questions about the protection of communication around the presidency and whether Trump should have been informed when the special counsel’s office got approval for the warrant on his Twitter account.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Twitter, now known as X, appealed the order that the social media company not disclose the investigative inquiry. Twitter was fined $350,000 in court for delaying turning over data as it attempted to convince a judge to give Trump more information.
A three-judge panel on the D.C. Circuit is also considering Trump’s claims of presidential immunity against Smith’s four-count indictment against him. A ruling over that dispute could be imminent, and the losing party almost assuredly will appeal to the nation’s highest court.