Now that special counsel Jack Smith has indicted Donald Trump in both of the prosecutor’s investigations, it’s tempting to think the focus will now shift to a new stage. Instead of learning about incremental developments in the respective probes, we should expect to see defense counsel and federal prosecutors begin preparing for upcoming trials.
But in this instance, it’s not quite that simple. For example, as NBC News reported, we learned new information today about Smith’s investigation into Trump’s post-election wrongdoing.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s office executed a search warrant on former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account earlier this year, searching for “evidence of criminal offenses,” according to a court ruling made public on Wednesday.
According to the latest reporting, as prosecutors executed a search warrant — a step the former president described today as an “attack“ — Twitter was slow to cooperate, leading to court-imposed sanctions.
A Washington Post report added that a newly unsealed appellate court ruling also revealed that District Court Judge Beryl Howell “found reason to believe that should the search warrant be made public, Trump might engage in obstructive conduct or flee prosecution.”
It’s an important detail: When the Justice Department sought information from Twitter, investigators reminded the social media company that it could not alert the former president to the search. As a New York Times report summarized, prosecutors feared that if the Republican learned about the warrant, it “would seriously jeopardize the ongoing investigation” by giving him “an opportunity to destroy evidence, change patterns of behavior, [or] notify confederates.”
Trump apparently sees this as a civil rights violation, but a federal judge understandably concluded that if the Republican was made aware of the warrant, he might try to obstruct the process — as he appears to have done before.
As for what the special counsel’s office was looking for, there’s plenty of interesting speculation, but we don’t yet know.
That’s not, however, the only revelation of note. Indeed, we also learned this week that a grand jury weighing evidence in the Trump election case returned to work yesterday — news that coincided with reports Smith and his team continue to scrutinize the Save America PAC’s finances. Indeed, none other than Bernie Kerik, a highly controversial former New York City police commissioner, spoke with investigators this week, and said soon after that the lines of inquiry related to Team Trump’s fundraising efforts — an angle no doubt familiar to regular readers. In case this weren’t quite enough, the New York Times also reported overnight on an internal campaign memo on the fake electors scheme from a Trump lawyer. The existence of the Dec. 6, 2020, memo came to light in last week’s indictment of Mr. Trump, though its details remained unclear. But a copy obtained by The New York Times shows for the first time that the lawyer, Kenneth Chesebro, acknowledged from the start that he was proposing “a bold, controversial strategy” that the Supreme Court “likely” would reject in the end. But even if the plan did not ultimately pass legal muster at the highest level, Mr. Chesebro argued that it would achieve two goals. It would focus attention on claims of voter fraud and “buy the Trump campaign more time to win litigation that would deprive Biden of electoral votes and/or add to Trump’s column.”
Taken together, it’s a timely reminder: There’s still plenty more to learn about the investigation and the underlying scandal.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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