AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster
The US Department of Justice tried to use its subpoena power to reveal the identity of a person on Twitter who made fun of one of former Donald Trump's top allies in Congress, according to a court document revealed Monday.
According to the document, first reported by The Wall Street Journal's Kevin Poulsen, the department — then under the control of former Attorney General William Barr — last year sought to compel Twitter to reveal who was behind the account, @NunesAlt.
The action came months after a judge threw out a lawsuit from Rep. Devin Nunes, a California Republican and Trump loyalist, which had alleged that the account and others like it were guilty of defamation.
Specifically, the Justice Department sought all "customer or subscriber account information" for @NunesAlt, beginning October 1, 2020. It also fought to prevent the demand from being made public, claiming that doing so could lead to the destruction of evidence.
Twitter, however, noted the timing in its response to the Justice Department's demand. In the filing, which had been kept out of the public eye until now, the company said the subpoena "may be related to Congressman Devin Nunes's repeated efforts to unmask individuals behind parody accounts critical of him." Twitter characterized those efforts as an attempt "to suppress critical speech."
Tweet Embed://twitter.com/mims/statuses/1394344671761993731?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
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
A spokesperson for Nunes did not immediately return a request for comment. After losing the 2020 election, Trump gave Nunes the Presidential Medal of Freedom, thanking the lawmaker for his steadfast commitment to defending him.
The person behind @NunesAlt, meanwhile, told Insider they were befuddled by the latest development, which came as a total shock.
"I'm learning about this just as everyone else is," they said.
Have a news tip? Email this reporter: cdavis@insider.com
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