Government

WTF Is The DOJ Doing Unmasking Devin Nunes' Critics On Twitter?

And exactly how many of these suits are there that we don't know about yet?

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In the past two years, Rep. Devin Nunes sued a Twitter cow, Fusion GPS, the Washington Post, CNN, Esquire, and McClatchy. But the California congressman was unable to exact just vengeance and billions of dollars from his critics by means of civil litigation. Damn you, First Amendment!

And so the indefatigable politician turned to Bill Barr’s Justice Department to rain hellfire down on his enemies. Or so it appears from a motion to quash a grand jury subpoena unsealed yesterday by Chief U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell.

According to Twitter’s filing, it received notice on October 1, 2020 of a grand jury subpoena to unmask the identity of the person behind an anonymous account, @NunesAlt, which regularly posts criticism of the controversial Republican to its 124,000 followers.

Michael Friedman, the DC AUSA named in the subpoena, told Twitter that the account was being investigated for threatening language but refused to point to any specific tweet or message which might have violated the law. Furthermore, the government imposed a gag order to prevent Twitter from notifying the account holder of the subpoena, supposedly to prevent “flight from prosecution, destruction of or tampering with evidence, intimidation of potential witnesses, and serious jeopardy to the investigation.”

I believe the technical legal term for this is “hinky as f*ck.”

“The idea that a political parody account would have made a specific enough threat beggars belief,” First Amendment lawyer Ari Cohn told ATL. “And if they wouldn’t even point to the threats, it’s difficult to believe that this was anything other pretext for unmasking an account that made fun of someone in Trump’s orbit.”

And, as eagle-eyed attorneys on Twitter noted, there’s an additional wrinkle to the story. (It’s Devin Nunes, the guy who got booted off the Russia inquiry after ninja-ing out of an Uber to get classified intel from the White House, only to hold a press conference purporting to deliver that same intel to the White House. Of course there’s a wrinkle.)

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Why is a U.S. Capitol Police officer the contact person for a Justice Department subpoena? Has Nunes sicced the Capitol cops on his enemies as a back door means of unmasking his critics? And why on earth did the DOJ go along with it?

With the account holder blissfully unaware of the criminal investigation, Twitter remained the only party able to contest the subpoena. Which, to its credit, it did, petitioning the court to “scrutinize the government’s legal and factual basis for seeking information about the Account” in light of the representative’s “litigation history” and quash the subpoena if the government is unable to assert a compelling interest in unmasking the account.

It also asked the court to unseal the pleadings and make the government defend its position publicly. On Sunday Chief Judge Howell unsealed Twitter’s motion and ordered the U.S. Attorney’s Office to put its opposition memorandum on the public docket by Wednesday, “with the name and contact information of the government attorney redacted.”

Is the court withholding the name of the lawyer on this questionable filing to protect his reputation? Or is it to obscure the fact that the call is coming from inside the Article I House?

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We’ll find out tomorrow. Or maybe not.

APPLICATION OF USA FOR 2705(b) NONDISCLOSURE ORDER FOR GRAND JURY SUBPOENA GJ2020111968168 [Docket via Court Listener]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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