Judicial Watch announced today that it filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Justice for records of any payments made by the FBI to Twitter (now known as X) (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of Justice (No. 1:23-cv-03004)). The payments were disclosed in internal Twitter documents (the “Twitter Files”) made available by Elon Musk to journalists. In a December 19, 2022, report on “Twitter Files,” independent journalist Michael Shellenberger reveals an email which states the FBI paid Twitter nearly $3.5 million of U.S. taxpayer money as “reimbursement for the time spent processing requests from the FBI” from October 2019 to February 2021.