Turns out Jack Smith was specifically going after Donald Trump’s Twitter DMs after all
Days ago the news broke that Special Counsel Jack Smith subpoenaed Donald Trump’s Twitter account at the start of the year and successfully obtained access to it several months ago. This raised questions about why Smith would be seeking to get inside Trump’s account. Was it about proving that Trump really posted this or that tweet, or was it about Trump’s DMs?
Turns out it’s reportedly the latter. For those not familiar, “DMs” are direct messages, the private messages that Twitter users can send directly to each other. Trump was always a prolific Twitter user, but up to now there has never been any reporting or discussion about him having used the DM feature. He famously doesn’t use email or text messaging, and DMs are similar to that, so it’s surprising to say the least that he’d be DMing people. Yet Jack Smith’s warrant makes clear that he was.
Does this mean that Trump was using Twitter direct messages as a way of coordinating his criminal plots with his co-conspirators? Was he under the mistaken impression that such messages weren’t permanent or couldn’t be subpoenaed? In any case, Trump appears to have stepped in it.
We still don’t know who Trump was exchanging direct messages with. Nor do we know why Jack Smith felt compelled to subpoena Trump’s account, as opposed to simply subpoenaing the other person’s account. Any DMs exchanged between Trump and another person would be visible in both accounts. Nor do we have any way of knowing if the other person is a target or a cooperator.
In any case, more information should surface soon about what Jack Smith was doing subpoenaing Donald Trump’s DMs. More to the point, none of the charges that Smith has brought against Trump appear to involve Trump’s DMs. So this is just the latest hint that Smith may not be done charging Trump.
