But on March 31, “Reddit received another message from the feds,” The Intercept reported. “This time, instead of requesting information about an individual user, the government ordered Reddit itself to appear before a grand jury, not in California, but in Washington.”
The subpoena was issued by prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s office in D.C., and the “records sought spanned a period approximately three times longer than ICE had originally requested,” the article said. The United States Attorney for the District of Columbia is Jeanine Pirro. The grand jury subpoena is a new tactic the Trump administration is using after it repeatedly lost attempts to subpoena information in court, CLDC Executive Director Lauren Regan told The Intercept.
Grand jury proceedings are not public. Grand juries can issue indictments after evaluating evidence presented by prosecutors to determine whether there is probable cause that someone committed a crime. Witnesses may be called to testify. If an indictment is issued, the accused would be tried.
“The only valid use of a grand jury is to investigate federal crimes,” Regan told The Intercept. It’s unclear how Doe’s Reddit posts are evidence of a crime, and the administration is “able to hide what they’re doing under the guise of a federal grand jury,” he said.
While the now-withdrawn subpoena is public, we do not have a copy of the subpoena. The CLDC told Ars today that it has no further comment on the case, noting that grand jury subpoenas are issued in secret.
Reddit: “We do not voluntarily share information with any government”
David Greene, senior attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “was not aware of any examples during the recent wave of immigration enforcement investigations in which a leading technology company has been called to appear before one of the secret panels,” The Intercept article said. “Free speech protections are weaker in the context of a grand jury, he explained: the procedures are not adversarial; their purpose is to allow a prosecutor to bring charges.”
