Seven business days after the Justice Department's Office of International Affairs transmitted its April 17 letter refusing French assistance on the X criminal probe, no second European jurisdiction has filed in support of Paris. [1] The paper's Thursday Day Six note marked the plateau; Friday's check is that the plateau is now a posture. The German Bundesnetzagentur, the Irish Data Protection Commission, and the European Commission under its own Digital Services Act enforcement authority have all remained publicly silent on the DOJ letter. The First Amendment is functioning, in operational effect, as transatlantic extradition-prevention policy.

The sequence of the week is worth restating. The Department of Justice letter, first reported by the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by Reuters on April 18, framed French requests for mutual legal assistance as "an effort to entangle the United States in a politically charged criminal proceeding aimed at wrongfully regulating through prosecution the business activities of a United States company" and characterised the French investigation as seeking to regulate "a public square for the free expression of ideas and opinions in a manner contrary to the First Amendment." [1] On Monday, April 20, Elon Musk did not appear for his scheduled voluntary interview with French prosecutors. Former X chief executive Linda Yaccarino also did not appear. [2] Paris prosecutors, responding through Reuters, said the no-show was "not an obstacle" and insisted on the independence of the French judiciary, guaranteed by constitutional separation of powers. [3]

Since Monday, the Parisian track has continued procedurally. French prosecutors can continue the probe without cooperation from the United States; they can issue arrest warrants that have no practical reach absent an extradition pathway the DOJ has now blocked in writing. What they cannot do — and what matters for the broader question — is bring another European jurisdiction into the investigation's scaffolding. That is the vacuum that has held all week. The DSA authorizes fines of up to six percent of global turnover; it has not been invoked against X on any of the questions the French prosecutors are investigating. Reporters Without Borders filed a civil-society complaint in Paris on Monday. A civil-society complaint is not a jurisdictional move.

The underlying investigation continues to turn on two questions: whether X's content-selection algorithm constitutes foreign interference under French law, and whether the platform extracted user data in ways that violated France's 2024 data-protection statutes. Both questions fall under DSA supervisory authority the European Commission holds in parallel to the French criminal track. The Commission's silence is therefore not procedural caution. It is a choice not to reinforce the French approach at a moment when that reinforcement would matter most. The diplomatic read is that Brussels does not want the DSA tested against a US platform at the same time the DOJ is publicly characterising such tests as First Amendment violations. [4]

The plateau itself is the information. When a single jurisdiction holds a criminal probe and no second jurisdiction files within seven business days of a public refusal letter, the probe becomes — operationally — a test case for extraterritorial reach that the enforcing state cannot demonstrate. France has the authority. It does not have the coalition. The paper's Wednesday parallel-jurisdiction pairing carried this with the Ohio ballot track; today that pairing extends as both tracks remain frozen. The next artifact either will be a DSA filing against X, which would change the architecture, or a French prosecutorial statement acknowledging the limits of the mutual-legal-assistance pathway. Neither has arrived on Day Seven.

-- CHARLES ASHFORD, London