From Daily Caller: 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 the FBI in October 2023 for records of payments after the FBI failed to respond to a FOIA request.
“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.”
In a post on X, Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton wrote: “ So @JudicialWatch sued to find out how much the Deep State/Biden FBI was paying Twitter (now @X) to censor and spy on Americans. Kash Patel’s FBI and Pam Bondi’s Justice Department told a federal court we shouldn’t get even summary quarterly totals of the payments because it might expose FBI law enforcement ‘secrets’….Unfortunately Chief Judge Boasberg agreed and told us we can’t have the info. So if you want know why I sometimes look ready to explode with frustration, you have one more reason why.”
So @JudicialWatch sued to find out how much the Deep State/Biden FBI was paying Twitter (now @X) to censor and spy on Americans. Kash Patel’s FBI and Pam Bondi’s Justice Department told a federal court we shouldn’t get even summary quarterly totals of the payments because it… https://t.co/6P6oqQDxDj
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) February 18, 2026
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