Why would they need the dbs when simple spider scripts could scrape every bit of data from the sites?
I presume they get a search warrant for the system drives - maybe even virtually, depending on where they’re physically located and, then, an image prepared + retained. In the case of TD it’s said that given such status they didn’t want to continue anything. They had trolls there just like on these threads, etc., and then #FakeNews had literally taken some of the troll things + stuff and published verbatim off TD.win & GW.win