The New Civil Liberties Alliance is asking a federal court to compel the FBI to disclose additional records concerning payments to Twitter and other organizations, arguing that the bureau has improperly withheld information under Freedom of Information Act exemptions.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A civil liberties organization is pressing a federal court to require the FBI to disclose records concerning payments made to Twitter and other private organizations, intensifying a Freedom of Information Act dispute stemming from disclosures contained in the “Twitter Files.”
The New Civil Liberties Alliance is pursuing the records in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where it sued the FBI and Justice Department after the bureau declined to provide what the organization considered an adequate response to its request. The underlying FOIA request was submitted Jan. 19, 2023, and sought documents concerning reported FBI payments or reimbursements to Twitter, now known as X, as well as other social media companies, technology companies, media organizations, think tanks and nongovernmental entities. NCLA filed its federal lawsuit in April 2025 and moved for summary judgment in June 2026.
NCLA says the information is needed to determine whether taxpayer money was used solely to reimburse companies for responding to lawful investigative demands or whether federal payments were also connected to requests involving content moderation, account restrictions or other efforts to influence material appearing on social media platforms.
The FBI has relied in part on FOIA Exemption 7(E), which protects certain law enforcement techniques and procedures when disclosure could create a risk that the law would be circumvented. In the early stages of the dispute, the bureau maintained that it could neither confirm nor deny the existence of some responsive records, a position NCLA has challenged as overly broad.
“Apparently, the FBI’s concern that federal law be obeyed does not extend to itself and its obligations under FOIA,” NCLA litigation counsel Casey Norman said in an emailed statement provided for this report.
NCLA argues that the government cannot categorically treat every payment-related record as protected law enforcement material without first determining whether the individual documents actually fall within the exemption.
The group says the FBI eventually produced 51 heavily redacted pages but maintains that the release did not resolve the dispute.
According to NCLA, the pages reveal little beyond dates and do not answer its central questions about the purpose and extent of payments involving social media companies.
The organization contends that the FBI’s production came too late and remains too limited to satisfy its obligations under federal transparency law.
The litigation grew out of disclosures publicized beginning in late 2022 after internal Twitter communications were provided to journalists following Elon Musk’s acquisition of the company.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger reported from those records that Twitter had received approximately $3.4 million from the FBI between October 2019 and February 2021 as reimbursement for time spent processing government requests. A separate FOIA case brought by Judicial Watch over the same general subject later produced records concerning the FBI’s reimbursements to Twitter.
NCLA is seeking to determine whether any portion of government payments extended beyond reimbursement for compulsory legal process.
“We already know from the public record that FBI officials met regularly with social-media companies and flagged particular content and accounts for censorship,” Norman said. “Yet when NCLA sought to determine whether FBI used taxpayer funds in connection with requests beyond compulsory legal process—including requests to suppress disfavored content or viewpoints—the Bureau refused to conduct a search and insists that merely acknowledging whether any such records even exist would expose secret law-enforcement techniques and help wrong-doers evade the law.”
The allegation that FBI interactions with technology companies amounted to censorship remains disputed. Federal officials have maintained in related litigation that their communications with platforms included national-security matters, election-related threats and misinformation concerns, while critics have argued that government pressure crossed constitutional boundaries.
“We largely suspect that the FBI paid Twitter and other comparable platforms for complying with the agency’s requests concerning their content moderation policies, i.e. the pressure campaign and censorship of politically disfavored content and viewpoints revealed via the preliminary discovery in Missouri v. Biden,” Norman said.
That lawsuit, originally known as Missouri v. Biden and later as Murthy v. Missouri, was brought by state governments and individual plaintiffs who alleged that federal officials improperly pressured social media companies to restrict constitutionally protected speech involving COVID-19, elections and other issues.
A federal district court initially issued an injunction restricting certain government communications with social media platforms, and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a narrower version.
The Supreme Court reversed in June 2024, concluding that the plaintiffs had not established Article III standing to obtain the injunction. The court expressly said it lacked jurisdiction to reach the merits of the constitutional claims, meaning its decision did not determine whether the challenged government-platform communications violated the First Amendment.
The distinction is central to NCLA’s current allegations because the organization cites information developed during that litigation as part of the reason it wants further disclosure of FBI financial records.
A separate federal FOIA case has already produced a judicial ruling favorable to the government on a more limited category of FBI-Twitter payment records.
In February, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg granted the Justice Department summary judgment in a Judicial Watch lawsuit seeking additional information about FBI reimbursements to Twitter.
The court found that the records at issue were generated in connection with subpoenas, warrants and other requests for information used in criminal and national-security investigations. The court concluded that those records were compiled for law enforcement purposes and that information concerning the payments could be withheld under FOIA Exemption 7(E).
That ruling characterized the payments before the court as reimbursements for costs incurred by Twitter while complying with lawful demands for information rather than compensation for content moderation.
Federal law allows government agencies in certain circumstances to reimburse electronic communications providers for expenses reasonably incurred while responding to legal process.
NCLA’s case seeks a broader set of documents and argues that the existence of lawful reimbursements for subpoenas or warrants does not establish that every FBI payment or reimbursement to a private organization necessarily served the same purpose.
The organization is therefore asking the court to require a more complete search and disclosure process rather than accept what it describes as a categorical reliance on a law enforcement exemption.
The FBI’s FOIA log confirms that a January 2023 request sought records involving “FBI Payments/Reimbursements Paid to Twitter, Other Social Media Platforms and Other Organizations.”
NCLA maintains that the public should be able to determine whether those expenditures were confined to ordinary investigative procedures or also involved government efforts to influence speech on private platforms.
The FBI and Justice Department have disputed NCLA’s legal position, while the organization continues to characterize the bureau’s response as “stonewalling.”
The court has not ruled that the FBI financed censorship, nor has NCLA established that the roughly $3.4 million identified in the Twitter records represented payments for suppressing speech. The confirmed public record includes reimbursements associated with law enforcement requests, while NCLA’s lawsuit seeks records it says are necessary to determine whether additional categories of payments existed and, if so, what they were for.
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