'Valuable information': Legal expert reveals why Jack Smith wanted Trump's Twitter DMs

Special counsel Jack Smith can gain "valuable information" from being able to directly access former President Donald Trump's Twitter account, explained former Robert Mueller investigation prosecutor Ryan Goodman on Tuesday's edition of CNN's "OutFront."

Smith's search warrant to obtain Trump's long-dormant account on Twitter, since renamed X, was first reported last week. Trump has long abandoned the platform even after his post-January 6 ban was lifted in favor of his own Truth Social website, but the account is still full of communications he had before the attack — both public and potentially private.

"I remember when [we broke the news] that there was this warrant," said anchor Erin Burnett. "Now he's got it. 500 pages of this back and forth. You mentioned DMs might be a part of it. This is a former president who didn't text and did not email. Apparently there's a voluminous amount of direct messages, some of which were deleted, others that had confidential information that were in this account."

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"We had some idea this might be in there just from the Court of Appeals decision, referring to Twitter having said they didn't want to give out this information, that the cat was out of the bag, that they were obtaining direct messages between him and another party that are not public on Twitter."

The significant aspect, Goodman continued, is that "the timescale for the search warrant means this is not just around January 6th. It's much broader than that. It's soaking up a lot of information that the government must have had probable cause."

"And then the second is, of course, we don't yet know, are the DMs only incoming?" said Goodman. "He's famously known for not really emailing. It could be that he's receiving private DMs coming in and maybe not sending them out. That could be part of what's still very valuable information."

Watch the video below or at the link here.

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