Elon Musk’s social media platform has provided Trump administration officials with a convenient avenue to push messages and combat unfavorable narratives, but when that activity online conflicts with the court record, judges and plaintiffs have taken notice.
Federal judges and the outside groups bringing the lawsuits that are stymying President Donald Trump’s agenda have repeatedly used White House officials’ X posts to drive their arguments in court, at times to the government’s detriment.
Controversial policies involving barring people with gender dysphoria from the military or dismantling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were already expected to face legal challenges, but those lawsuits were complicated by X activity.
Judge Ana Reyes gave her perspective on X posts during a court hearing last month, signaling that she believed government employees’ communications on the platform carried as much weight as they would anywhere else.
In a case she was presiding over involving Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, she told the courtroom she would take his X posts literally.
“This isn’t ‘people.’ This isn’t my friend Jane on the street who I pass by. This is the secretary of defense. This is the guy who issued the policy,” Reyes told Department of Justice attorneys after they argued that people use “shorthand” on X.
1. Judge Reyes highlights Hegseth’s X post as evidence of broad ban on transgender troops
Reyes, a Biden appointee, blocked the Trump administration from imposing a ban on people with gender dysphoria serving in the military, saying it amounted to unjustified discrimination of all transgender people.
The DOJ repeatedly argued in court that the ban was a policy rooted in science and targeted at people with gender dysphoria, not all transgender people.
Reyes highlighted an X post Hegseth shared, writing on page one of her 80-page injunction that while Trump’s executive order and Hegseth’s subsequent policy instructions on the ban do not use the word “transgender,” “both the Department of Defense and Secretary Hegseth announced this inescapable fact via social media.”
“Transgender troops are disqualified from service without an exemption,” the post, written by a Pentagon-run account and shared by Hegseth, read.
The DOJ said in court the remark was “shorthand.” The judge responded in her order, “Seriously?”
“These were not off-the-cuff remarks at a cocktail party,” Reyes wrote. “DoD and Secretary Hegseth used official government accounts to announce a new policy affecting the entire U.S. Military. The Court presumes that in doing so they did not use loose or misleading language. Indeed, if the Hegseth Policy addressed only gender dysphoria, the post would have read, ‘Gender dysphoria is a disqualifying medical condition for service.’ Both sentences contain nine words, belying counsel’s ‘shorthand’ excuse.”
Hegseth himself posted again this week that “trans” are no longer allowed at the Department of Defense.
2. Judge McConnell grants temporary order because of press secretary’s X post
In the early stages of a lawsuit brought by 22 states challenging the administration’s multitrillion-dollar freeze on federal grant money, Judge John McConnell, an Obama appointee, referenced press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s X post to justify a temporary restraining order.
Leavitt wrote in her post that the White House rescinded an Office of Management & Budget memo on the freeze in the face of a lawsuit over it, but she said the move was “NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.”
“The President’s EO’s on federal funding remain in full force and effect, and will be rigorously implemented,” she wrote.
McConnell granted the states’ request for the temporary restraining order, saying the memo’s withdrawal was “hugely ambiguous” and that the freeze “hasn’t changed based on comments by the president’s press secretary.”
“That’s my read of the tweet. I can’t believe I’m saying that, but that’s my read of the tweet,” the judge said.
3. Judge Boasberg uses Rubio’s X activity to bolster contempt proceedings
Judge James Boasberg’s mission to find out whether Trump administration officials defied his order last month to return alleged Venezuelan gang members deported under the Alien Enemies Act ended with the judge initiating contempt proceedings.
Boasberg, an Obama appointee, said that all evidence showed that federal authorities landed two planes of migrants in El Salvador and transferred them to a Salvadoran prison on March 15 “hours after” he ordered the government to return them to the United States.
But X activity, including by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, made matters “worse,” Boasberg wrote in a memorandum.
“Worse, boasts by Defendants intimated that they had defied the Court’s Order deliberately and gleefully,” the judge wrote. “The Secretary of State, for instance, retweeted a post in which, above a news headline noting this Court’s Order to return the flights to the United States, the President of El Salvador wrote: ‘Oopsie . . . Too late 😂😂.’”
4. Judge Jackson plasters Musk’s and Vought’s X posts on front page of 112-page injunction preserving CFPB
OMB Director Russ Vought, the former acting head of the CFPB, indicated to the court that he was not shutting the CFPB down but rather streamlining it to make it more efficient. But unions alleged in a lawsuit that Vought and Musk, the informal head of the Department of Government Efficiency and an adviser to Trump, had led them to believe otherwise.
“RIP CFPB,” Musk wrote on his platform in February next to an emoji of a tombstone.
Attorneys on behalf of the unions fighting to keep the CFPB alive and prevent mass firings within the agency highlighted Musk’s post in their lawsuit. They raised it again in the courtroom. Judge Amy Berman Jackson got the message, finding that the administration improperly rushed to dismantle the CFPB, a congressionally created watchdog that investigates big banks’ loan practices.
Jackson, an Obama appointee, opened her 112-page preliminary injunction against the government with Musk’s quote. She followed it with a quote from Vought’s X page.
“The CFPB has been a woke and weaponized agency against disfavored industries and individuals for a long time,” Vought wrote in February. “This must end.”
5. DOJ argued Musk is an adviser who lacks authority over USAID, but Musk said on X he fed agency ‘to the wood chipper’
Judge Theodore Chuang, an Obama appointee, ordered the Trump administration last month to temporarily reinstate employee access to the U.S. Agency for International Development’s computer systems, saying Musk and DOGE likely violated the Constitution by removing that access in an attempt to take down the agency.
The DOJ argued that Musk was merely an adviser to Trump and not the person taking such powerful action at USAID, but Chuang said X information told him otherwise.
“Musk’s public statements and posts on X, in which he has stated on multiple occasions that DOGE will take action, and such action occurred shortly thereafter, demonstrate that he has firm control over DOGE,” Chuang said.
The judge said that unconstitutionally dissolving USAID was Musk’s clear intention based on his X activity.
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“We spent the weekend feeding USAID to the wood chipper. Could gone to some great parties. Did that instead,” Musk said.
Chuang also observed that Musk insisted during an X live stream in February that DOGE’s work inside the agency, which manages foreign aid, was not “minor housecleaning” but rather a “shutting down” of USAID.
