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Prosecutors said the plot had begun when Mr. Abouammo met Bader Binasaker, a top adviser for Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. At the time, Mr. Binasaker was operating as a foreign government official, and Mr. Abouammo knew it, prosecutors said. They continued communicating with each other and later met in London, where Mr. Binasaker gave Mr. Abouammo a luxury watch.
“The kingdom had now secured its Twitter insider,” Mr. Cheng said.
Over subsequent months, prosecutors said, Mr. Abouammo used Twitter’s tools to access the personal information of users such as the pseudonymous Mujtahidd, a critic of the Saudi government whose Twitter account Mr. Binasaker wanted suspended. In return for accessing that information, Mr. Abouammo received wire transfers from Mr. Binasaker, prosecutors said.
In effect, Saudi Arabia had “paid for a mole,” Mr. Cheng said.
But lawyers for Mr. Abouammo argued that he had been just a Twitter employee doing his job, not a spy for Saudi Arabia. Prosecutors used “bits and pieces that they have specifically plucked out of context and tried to assemble to create the picture they want you see,” said Angela Chuang, a federal public defender who represents Mr. Abouammo and a lead attorney in the case.
Mr. Abouammo’s lawyers said his duties at Twitter had included developing relationships with prominent individuals from the Middle East and looking into accounts that received persistent complaints, such as Mujtahidd’s. His lawyers said that Mr. Abouammo had executed those duties but that the government did not have evidence that he had then shared user information with Mr. Binasaker.
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