Newly unsealed records provide new details about the Trump administration’s failed effort this spring to obtain a search warrant for an Instagram account run by student protesters at Columbia University.

The FBI and federal prosecutors sought a sweeping warrant, the records show , that would have identified the people who ran the account along with every user who had interacted with it since January 2024.

Between March 15 and April 14, the FBI and the Department of Justice filed multiple search warrant applications and appeared numerous times before two different judges in Manhattan federal court as part of an investigation into Columbia University Apartheid Divest, or CUAD, a student group. A magistrate judge denied the application three times in March, a decision which a district co

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