After a long wait, Judge Aileen Cannon has finally docketed the exhibits behind Trump’s motion to compel discovery in the Trump stolen documents case. Much of the dispute centers on claims that the Archives exhibited political bias because they wanted to archive Trump’s presidential materials.
As such, the exhibits include details about NARA’s efforts to archive the Twitter accounts Trump and others used during their tenure. NARA would later send Carol Maloney a version of this in 2022, which focused attention on tweets that people like Ivanka had deleted.
As that letter revealed, the exhibit reveals that Trump didn’t start automatically preserving tweets until 2018, but took quite some time to include everyone in the archiving process.
Whereas Ivanka’s deleted tweets seemed particularly important in 2022, Andrew Giuliani — who had contact with Kellye SoRelle — look more important from this vantage.
But the detail that takes on most new significance given what we’ve learned since is that the White House didn’t choose to archive DMs.
Again, this was in that 2022 letter to Maloney. But we now know that when Xitter tried to refuse to turn over material from Trump’s account, Jack Smith pointed to the incomplete nature of what NARA had as one of his bases for needing to go to Xitter directly.
I still doubt that was the most important item that Smith was looking for. But Trump’s earlier failures may have been part of what gave Smith cause to demand more important information on attribution from Elon Musk.