Last week, Special Counsel Jack Smith sent a search warrant to X(Twitter), requesting a trove of information about the account of former President Donald J. Trump, as well as information on the millions of accounts that interacted with Trump’s account — even those that simply “liked” a tweet by Trump between October 2020 to January 2021. When Twitter initially refused to divulge that private information of its users, the government quickly fined the company $350,000.
On the same day, Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over Jack Smith’s case against former President Donald Trump, denied a motion by Trump’s legal team seeking materials and evidence that they claim the Democrat-led House January 6th Committee, had not turned over to the National Archives. Judge Chutkan accused the Trump team of going on a “fishing expedition” for requesting those documents. These are documents that should have already been turned over to the National Archives and the public should have access to, but the government is keeping them a secret, most likely, because they have exculpatory evidence on them that Trump can use to prove his innocence.
So, requesting documents from the January 6 Committee’s investigation which were already supposed to be turned over to the National Archives, which are directly related to the charges at hand, is a “fishing expedition”, but using the power the Federal Government to compel a private company to turn over the private information of millions of American citizens, many of whom, at best have a tangential connection to the case, is a reasonable discovery request? This is another example of the people on the far-left weaponizing the judicial system not only to go after their political opponents, but to intimidate the people who support their political opponents.
So, a private citizen who is on trial for committing a crime, cannot have access to documents that the government is in possession of, which could prove his innocence, but the government can get access to and randomly search the private information on tens of millions of American citizens, who really have nothing to do with the case. Private citizens cannot see what our public officials are doing, but our public officials have access to all the private information of private citizens. Donald Trump, not being allowed to see the evidence that was gathered by the January 6th committee, is a violation of the due process clauses in the 6th, and 14th amendments to our Constitution, but he is the threat to our Constitution and system of government. The are willing to violate the Constitution to protect the Constitution.
We have it completely backwards in this country. Our elected officials, the people in power, the government, should be 100% transparent to its citizens, while the citizens should not be obligated to be transparent at all to the government. Yet, it is the exact opposite in the United States of America. For 49 years abortion rights hinged on the concept of a fundamental “right to privacy”. That was the only justification for a woman to be able to kill her child. But we do not have a right to privacy if our private information is going to be divulged to the government without our consent. We saw this when Bank of America turned over the financial transactions of private citizens to the government following January 6th riot at the Capital. They will argue that Trump and the January 6th defendants are a threat to our country, and that’s the reason they need suspend our right to privacy.
But in 2015, after the terrorist attack in San Bernadino, California, which killed 14 innocent American citizens and injured another 22, Apple CEO Tim Cook refused the request of the FBI to unlock the iPhone of one of the terrorists, Syed Farook, claiming he was defending civil liberties. Cook argued that, if Apple did it for one person, then it would have to do it for everybody. Tim Cook believed that protecting the right to privacy for everybody is more important than this one individual case, even though the person’s civil liberties he was protecting was a terrorist, who killed over a dozen people, and there may have been information on his iPhone, which could have prevented a second terrorist attack. The principle of an individual’s right to privacy was so sacred that he was willing to risk another deadly terrorist attack protecting it.
But when it comes to getting Trump, the powerful people, the big tech oligarchs like Tim Cook, are no longer standing on principle. They are throwing all of their principles out the window. But in reality, these people never had the principles that they hide behind to begin with. They believe in a principle when that principle serves their agenda and then violate the very same principle when it gets in the way of their agenda.
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Judd Garrett is a graduate from Princeton University, and a former NFL player, coach, and executive. He has been a contributor to the website Real Clear Politics. He has recently published his first novel, No Wind.