Image: Laura Normand / The Verge
US special counsel Jack Smith acquired direct messages — potentially including deleted messages — from former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, unsealed court transcripts have revealed. The transcripts, spotted by Politico, show that engineers for Twitter (now known as X) were able to produce Trump’s Twitter data after missing a January 7th deadline to comply with a search warrant that earned the company a $350,000 fine.
Among many other things, the warrant sought the former president’s tweets (including drafts), likes, retweets, and any direct messages “sent from, received by, stored in draft form in, or otherwise associated with” his account, @realDonaldTrump.
Twitter engineers were able to provide what Twitter lawyer George…