Attorney General Bill Barr‘s Dept. of Justice, in a possibly illegal move, used used its full weight and power to try to determine the identity of the person behind a Twitter account parodying a top Trump-supporting congressman, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA).
On November 24, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice, via a secret grand jury, served Twitter, Inc. with not only a subpoena ordering the social media company to reveal the identity of Twitter user “@NunesAlt,” but also with a gag order requiring the company to not reveal the existence of the subpoena, The Daily Beast reports.
This was just unsealed. In the last weeks of the Trump administration, William Barr's Justice Department tried to use a secret grand jury subpoena to unmask @NunesAlt, a Devin Nunes parody account. https://t.co/ENc4oiUV0f
— kpoulsen (@kpoulsen) May 17, 2021
Legal experts are expressing outrage.
Let's be clear about this: the DOJ attempting to secretly unmask a social media account that parodies an elected official is a gross abuse of government power and a severe threat to the First Amendment. https://t.co/V81WKXB5hQ
— Ari Cohn (@AriCohn) May 17, 2021
Every day we learn about more corruption in Bill Barr’s DOJ. They actually served a grand jury subpoena on Twitter to unmask the identity of the person behind a Devin Nunes parody account. DOJ not only acted as Trump’s personal law firm, they were also working for Nunes! https://t.co/yIa3z3yYZn
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 17, 2021