Protecting the Deep state
Bondi’s DOJ Still Refusing To Disclose Gov’t Payments To Twitter During Peak Censorship
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is continuing to conceal details of payments the government made to Twitter amid its push to censor “misinformation” online.
Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, agreed that the Department of Justice (DOJ) can withhold the FBI’s quarterly payments to Twitter for “legal-process requests” between 2016 to 2023 in a Feb. 4 opinion.
The FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million between October 2019 and February 2021, an email in the “Twitter Files” reported by journalist Michael Shellenberger revealed. The exact purpose of the payment, which took place during peak government pressure on platforms to patrol content about COVID-19, remains unclear.
Judicial Watch sued in October 2023 to obtain records of any payments after the FBI “failed to respond adequately” to their initial Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking details about the payments in December 2022.
“These records were created as part of serving subpoenas, warrants, and other requests on Twitter to retrieve information that would help the FBI investigate crimes and national-security threats,” Boasberg wrote in his Feb. 4 opinion. “The investigatory activities that gave rise to the documents were thus related to enforcing federal laws and maintaining national security, and there was a rational relationship between those investigations and the Bureau’s law-enforcement duties.”
While Twitter already releases semi-annual reports showing how many “legal process requests” it received and complied with, making quarterly payments for FBI-specific requests public could add detail that reveals “how, when, and under which circumstances certain techniques are employed by law enforcement and investigative agencies,” Boasberg wrote.
Internal documents released in the Twitter Files revealed in 2023 how government officials flagged posts deemed COVID-19 “misinformation” for the company to take down.
https://dailycaller.com/2026/02/27/trump-doj-fbi-twitter-payments/