A federal judge has handed the FBI a win in its attempts to keep secrets. On February 4th, Chief Judge James Boasberg ruled that the bureau can keep secret the precise amounts it paid Twitter between 2016 and 2023 for complying with legal process requests.
Judicial Watch, which had sued under the Freedom of Information Act, walked away empty-handed.
We obtained a copy of the opinion for you here.
You may remember our earlier reporting on how the FBI was paying Twitter. The payments totaled at least $3.4 million between October 2019 and February 2021 alone. That figure emerged from the Twitter Files released in December 2022. The FBI has never confirmed it. Neither has Twitter. And now, thanks to Boasberg’s ruling, the quarterly breakdown that would show exactly when the money flowed, and how much, stays buried.
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What were the payments for? Officially, reimbursements. Federal law requires agencies to compensate companies for the cost of responding to subpoenas, search warrants, and national security legal demands. The FBI was sending those requests to Twitter in volume.
During the period leading up to the 2020 election, the FBI’s Elvis Chan and colleagues were holding weekly meetings with Twitter staff about “misinformation.” They were flagging accounts. They were flagging content. And they were being reimbursed for the legal paperwork that accompanied all of it.
The Trump DOJ, through US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office, filed for summary judgment in December 2025, arguing the payment amounts are shielded by FOIA’s Exemption 7(E). That exemption covers law enforcement techniques and procedures whose disclosure could help criminals evade detection. Boasberg agreed, accepting the government’s argument that quarterly payment figures, combined with Twitter’s own transparency reports, could let bad actors reverse-engineer where the FBI is looking and where it isn’t.
The logic is that if you know the FBI paid Twitter significantly more in Q4 2021 than Q3, you might infer the bureau ramped up surveillance following a specific event. A foreign intelligence service could check whether its operation triggered a spike.
Criminals could compare the FBI’s Twitter payments with what it pays other platforms and migrate accordingly. The government’s declarations assert this. Boasberg deferred to them, as courts in national security cases routinely do.
The mosaic theory the FBI invoked is real, and courts have repeatedly credited it. The problem isn’t the legal framework. The problem is what it conceals.
The FBI was not simply investigating criminals during this period. It was meeting weekly with a private company’s content moderation team, flagging accounts of vaccine skeptics, lab-leak researchers, people who questioned the 2020 election, and journalists covering Hunter Biden.
The $3.4 million in payments flowed through that same relationship. The legal-process reimbursements and the content-flagging meetings ran in parallel, conducted by the same FBI personnel, aimed at the same platform, during the same politically charged window before a presidential election.
The quarterly payment breakdown requested would have shown, at a minimum, whether FBI engagement with Twitter spiked during electorally sensitive periods. It would have let the public cross-reference the payment timeline with known events: the weekly misinformation meetings, the account flagging, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story. That is exactly the kind of accountability information FOIA exists to surface.
Instead, Boasberg ruled that the numbers stay hidden because releasing them might tell a foreign spy whether the FBI noticed something. The court gave meaningful weight to the government’s national security declarations, as FOIA doctrine requires, and no weight at all to the public’s interest in understanding how the FBI was spending money on the platform it was simultaneously using as a content moderation partner.
Judicial Watch had pointed out that Twitter’s semi-annual transparency reports already publish aggregate data on law enforcement requests. Boasberg acknowledged this but found that quarterly FBI-specific figures would add enough granularity to create a meaningful risk. The detail that remains secret is not how the FBI monitors threats online. Everyone knows that. What remains secret is the scale and timing of the FBI’s financial relationship with a platform it was also directing to censor Americans.
The ruling does not find that the FBI acted properly during this period. It does not address the weekly misinformation meetings or the account flagging. It simply holds that the payment figures are protected law enforcement information, and that Judicial Watch gets nothing.
Boasberg wrote that disclosure could “risk circumvention of the law.” The circumvention that went unexamined in his opinion is the one that may have already occurred.
