The Supreme Court is rejecting an appeal from Elon Musk’s X Corporation challenging Special Counsel Jack Smith’s order to hand over records from President Trump’s account. 

The court did not provide a comment when it rejected the appeal on Monday. X did not respond to a request for comment. 

Last year, Mr. Smith obtained information on Trump’s direct messages, draft tweets that were deleted, and searches from his account as part of his investigation into the former president’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election. 

In a January 2023 order, Mr. Smith’s office sought “all content, records, and other information relating to communications sent from or received by” the former president’s account between October 2020 and January 2021. 

However, X did not hand over the records, as it insisted at the time that some of the information could have been covered by executive privilege. The focus of the social media company’s concern was a gag order that prevented it from notifying Trump or giving him a chance to appeal the order to hand over the documents. 

A federal judge, Beryl Howell, ordered X to hand over the information requested by Mr. Smith and fined the company $350,000 for the delay in its compliance.

X called the order to hand over the records an “unprecedented end-run around executive privilege,” which it said could have an impact on other users on the platform by potentially setting a precedent for letting prosecutors access information that is protected by other privileges such as attorney-client privilege. 

The special counsel’s office defended the order, arguing, “The Fourth Amendment permits the government to obtain a warrant to search property belonging to an innocent third party as long as the warrant is supported by probable cause that ‘evidence of a crime will be found.’”

By the time it filed its appeal, X had already handed over the documents to Mr. Smith. It was asking the Supreme Court to prevent prosecutors from taking similar steps to obtain documents in future cases.