A lawyer for the 2024 Trump campaign is urging Facebook to unblock the former president's account on the social media site after it was suspended following the Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

The Trump campaign formally petitioned Meta, Facebook's parent company, to unlock the former president's account on Tuesday, according to a report from NBC News.

"We believe that the ban on President Trump's account on Facebook has dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse," the Trump campaign letter to the company said, according to NBC News.

The lawyer who sent the letter, Scott Gast, requested a meeting with Meta officials "to discuss President Trump's prompt reinstatement to the platform."

"Donald Trump is a declared candidate for President of the United States," reads the letter, which was dated on Tuesday. "He is the leading contender for the Republican nomination in numerous public opinion polls. ... We also believe that a continued ban would basically constitute ... a deliberate effort by a private company to silence Mr. Trump's political voice."

Trump was banned from Facebook a day after the riot at the Capitol, when protesters attempted to interfere with the certification of the 2020 election. Trump, and state officials in his orbit, spent time after the 2020 election spreading misinformation claiming that the presidential election was stolen from Trump.

"The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in 2021, decrying Trump's "decision to use his platform to condone rather than condemn the actions of his supporters at the Capitol building has rightly disturbed people in the US and around the world."

"We removed these statements yesterday because we judged that their effect — and likely their intent — would be to provoke further violence," Zuckerberg wrote.

The company's Oversight Board, an independent group of human rights experts, academics, and lawyers that issues binding rulings on some of Meta's content moderation decisions, later upheld the suspension but criticized the company for not establishing criteria for suspending a user indefinitely.

Trump was also banned from Twitter the same day, but his account on that platform has already been reinstated. Following his acquisition of the platform in October, Elon Musk welcomed Trump back to Twitter with open arms, only for the former president to not post at all since his reinstatement.

Trump is now considering a return to Twitter, according to the NBC News report.

In November, Trump announced his decision to run for another term in the White House. The success of Trump's 2016 campaign was in large part due to his ability to gather massive amounts of followers on sites like Facebook and Twitter. On his Truth Social platform, where he has retreated during his prolonged suspensions, Trump has just 4.8 million followers.

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