The Department of Justice is moving to keep the lid on specific financial records detailing payments made to Twitter, despite growing pressure to reveal the full extent of the government’s influence on social media moderation.
In a decision handed down on Feb. 4, Judge James Boasberg ruled that the DOJ can legally withhold data regarding quarterly payments made to the platform for “legal-process requests” spanning from 2016 to 2023.
The legal battle began after Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit in October 2023. The watchdog group sought transparency after the FBI failed to provide details on a series of payments totaling nearly $3.5 million between late 2019 and early 2021.
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While the government maintains these funds were standard reimbursements for processing subpoenas and warrants, critics argue the timing aligns with a period of intense federal pressure on tech companies to flag “misinformation” regarding COVID-19 and the 2020 election.
Judge Boasberg sided with the government’s national security concerns.
“These records were created as part of serving subpoenas, warrants, and other requests on Twitter to retrieve information that would help the FBI investigate crimes and national-security threats,” Boasberg wrote.
He argued that revealing the specific quarterly fluctuations in these payments could tip off “bad actors” to law enforcement methods.
The government echoed this sentiment in a December 2025 filing, stating that releasing the figures would “provide insights into the FBI’s investigative activities that bad actors would use to evade FBI detection.”
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The controversy is rooted in the “Twitter Files,” a series of internal documents released in late 2022 and 2023. Those records showed that federal officials frequently flagged specific posts for removal and warned Twitter about potential foreign “hack-and-leak” operations just before the 2020 election.
This led to the temporary suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, which was later verified as authentic by various news outlets.
The FBI has defended the payments as “reasonable costs and expenses associated with their response to a legal process,” calling it a standard procedure.
Nevertheless, the refusal to disclose the quarterly breakdown has added to a growing list of grievances from conservative groups who claim the DOJ remains overly secretive. This tension follows similar recent disputes over the release of the Epstein files and records related to Hunter Biden’s business dealings.
As it stands, the DOJ maintains it has already “released all non-exempt reasonably segregable portions” of the requested records. For now, the exact financial footprint of the FBI’s relationship with Twitter during the last two presidential administrations will remain largely shielded from public view.
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