The law is very clear that receiving and publishing stolen trade secret information is in itself a culpable act unless the publication is somehow protected by the first amendment.

There is generally no first amendment protection for publishing confidential information about products, partnering relationships, strategy meetings, and the like.

My guess, though, is that the first-amendment angle made it just murky enough to cause Twitter to make a judgment call to "work with" TechCrunch to limit damage and try to be done with this.

I see it as basically extortion, however, with Twitter being coerced into giving grudging permission to let this stuff come out.

What a massive embarrassment for Twitter. I have worked with literally thousands of founders and entrepreneurs over the years, and I don't know one that would not be thoroughly red-faced at watching this sort of stuff being splashed about the web (not because the information is damaging in itself but in having allowed this to happen).