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ken klippenstein
'Let's See If I Get Banned Again!' Journalist Releases Team Trump Rubio Dossier
Trump's reported pick for secretary of state previously suggested the president-elect "could not be trusted with America's nuclear codes" and criticized him for "using language in seeming praise of Putin."
Nov 12, 2024
With U.S. President-elect Donald Trump reportedly set to pick Sen. Marco Rubio as his secretary of state, journalist Ken Klippenstein on Tuesday published a 551-page dossier that the campaign previously compiled on the Florida Republican.
Like the dossier on Vice President-elect JD Vance that Klippenstein released on KLIPNEWS in September, the Rubio file "was offered to major media outlets this summer," the independent journalist noted. "All refused to publish it, not over questions about its authenticity, but because the media thinks it is an arm of the national security state, complying with U.S. government's warnings that because the document came from Iran, the American people shouldn't see it."
"Let's see if I get banned again!" Klippenstein said Tuesday on X, the social media platform formerly called Twitter and now owned by billionaire Trump backer Elon Musk. Klippenstein was "permanently" suspended over the Vance dossier, but after The New York Timesreported last month that the Trump campaign coordinated with X to suppress the document, Musk had Klippenstein reinstated in the name of "free speech principles," according to correspondence obtained by the journalist.
The latest dossier, Klippenstein noted, "is authentic and there are no signs it was altered, something spokespersons for both the Trump campaign and Rubio did not deny when I contacted them for comment and provided them with copies of the dossier."
The journalist highlighted sections of the document detailing Rubio's past remarks about Trump related to Russian collusion in 2016, the 2020 election, Trump's control over nuclear weapons, the September 11 terrorist attacks, Russian President Vladimir Putin, NATO, North Korea's Kim Jong Un, free trade, China, immigration, Iran, the Iraq war, and the U.S. withdrawal from Syria.
For example, the dossier notes that "in 2016, Rubio contended that Trump was dangerous and could not be trusted with America's nuclear codes," and "in 2022, Rubio said it was 'unfortunate' Trump was using language in seeming praise of Putin."
In addition to detailing Rubio's critiques of Trump and "undermining of the 'America First' agenda," the document—last updated April 1, 2024—lays out some of his "questionable" policy positions as well as "ethics issues" and "controversial associations."
So far, Trump's other reported or confirmed foreign policy picks are: Congressman Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) for national security adviser, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) for ambassador to the United Nations, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee for ambassador to Israel, Steven C. Witkoff for special envoy to the Middle East, and Brian Hook to lead the U.S. State Department transition team.
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Klippenstein, Musk, the Vance Dossier, and a Double-Standard on Leaks
Musk’s Twitter is keeping certain information out of the public view—information that just happens to damage the presidential ticket he supports.
Oct 01, 2024
Ken Klippenstein, an independent reporter operating on Substack and an investigative alum of the Intercept, announced (Substack, 9/26/24) that he had been kicked off Twitter (now rebranded as X). His crime, he explained, stemmed from posting the 271-page official dossier of Republican vice presidential candidate’s J.D. Vance’s campaign vulnerabilities; the US government alleges that the information was leaked through Iranian hacking. In other words, the dossier is a part of the “foreign meddling campaign” of “enemy states.”
Klippenstein is not the first reporter to gain access to these papers (Popular Information, 9/9/24), but most of the reporting about this dossier has been on the intrigue revolving around Iranian hacking rather than the content itself (Daily Beast, 8/10/24; Politico, 8/10/24; Forbes, 8/11/24). Klippenstein decided it was time for the whole enchilada to see the light of day:
As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself.
“The terror regime in Iran loves the weakness and stupidity of Kamala Harris, and is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Donald J. Trump,” Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, responded when I asked him about the hack.
If the document had been hacked by some “anonymous”-like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combating foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement that alleged Iranian hacking (9/18/24) was “malicious cyber activity” and “the latest example of Iran’s multi-pronged approach…to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process.”
Where’s the beef?
The Vance report isn’t as salacious as Vance’s false and bizarre comments about Haitians eating pets (NPR, 9/15/24), but it does show that he has taken positions that have fractured the right, such as aid for Ukraine; the report calls him one of the “chief obstructionists” to providing assistance to the country against Russia. It dedicates several pages to Vance’s history of criticizing Trump and the MAGA movement, suggesting that his place on the ticket could divide Trump’s voting base.
On the other hand, it outlines many of his extreme right-wing stances that could alienate him with putative moderates. It says Vance “appears to have once called for slashing Social Security and Medicare,” and “is opposed to providing childcare assistance to low-income Americans.” He “supports placing restrictions on abortion access,” and states that “he does not support abortion exceptions in the case of rape.”
And for any voter who values 7-day-a-week service, Vance “appears to support laws requiring businesses to close on Sundays.” It quotes him saying: “Close the Damn Businesses on Sunday. Commercial Freedom Will Suffer. Moral Behavior Will Not, and Our Society Will Be Much the Better for It.” That might not go over well with small business owners, and any worker who depends on their Sunday shifts.
‘Took a deep breath’
Are the findings in the Vance dossier the story of the century? Probably not, but it’s not nothing that the Trump campaign is aware its vice presidential candidate is loaded with liabilities. There are at least a few people who find that useful information.
And the Washington Post (9/27/24) happily reported on private messages Vance sent to an anonymous individual who shared them with the newspaper that explained Vance’s flip-flopping from a Trump critic to a Trump lover. Are the private messages really more newsworthy than the dossier—or is the issue that the messages aren’t tainted by allegedly foreign fingerprints? Had that intercept of material involved an Iranian, would it have seen the light of day?
In fact, the paper (8/13/24) explained that news organizations, including the Post, were reflecting on the foreign nature of the leak when deciding how deep they should report on the content they received:
“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of the Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”
Double standards for leaks
There seems to be a disconnect, however, between ill-gotten information that impacts a Republican ticket and information that tarnishes a Democrat.
Think back to 2016. When “WikiLeaks released a trove of emails apparently hacked from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman email account, unleashing thousands of messages,” as Politico (10/7/16) reported, the outlet didn’t just merely report on the hack, it reported on the embarrassing substance of the documents. In 2024, by contrast, when Politico was given the Vance dossier, it wrote nothing about its contents, declaring that “questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents” (CNN, 8/13/24).
The New York Times and Washington Post similarly found the Clinton leaks—which were believed at the time to have been given to WikiLeaks by Russia—far more newsworthy than the Vance dossier. The Times “published at least 199 articles about the stolen DNC and Clinton campaign emails between the first leak in June 2016 and Election Day,” Popular Information (9/9/24) noted.
FAIR editor Jim Naureckas (11/24/09) has written about double standards in media, noting that information that comes to light through unethical or illegal means is played up if that information helps powerful politicians and corporations. Meanwhile, if such information obtained questionably is damaging, the media focus tends to be less on the substance, and more on whether the public should be hearing about such matters.
For example, when a private citizen accidentally overheard a cell phone conversation between House Speaker John Boehner, former Speaker Newt Gingrich and other Republican congressmembers, and made a tape that showed Gingrich violating the terms of a ethics sanction against him, news coverage focused on the illegality of taping the conversation, not on the ethics violation the tape revealed (Washington Post, 1/14/97; New York Times, 1/15/97).
But when climate change deniers hacked climate scientists’ email, that produced a front-page story in the New York Times (11/20/09) scrutinizing the correspondence for any inconsistencies that could be used to bolster the deniers’ arguments.
When Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Michael Gallagher wrote a series of stories about the Chiquita fruit corporation, based in part on listening without authorization to company voicemails, the rest of the media were far more interested in Gallagher’s ethical and legal dilemmas (he was eventually sentenced to five years’ probation) rather than the bribery, fraud and worker abuse his reporting exposed.
Meet the new boss
There’s a certain degree of comedy in the hypocrisy of Klippenstein’s suspension. Since right-wing billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, he has claimed that his administration would end corporate censorship, but instead he’s implemented his own censorship agenda (Guardian, 1/15/24; Al Jazeera, 8/14/24).
The Independent (1/29/23) reported that Musk “oversaw a campaign of suppression that targeted his critics upon his assumption of power at Twitter.” He
personally directed the suspension of a left-leaning activist, Chad Loder, who became known across the platform for his work helping to identify participants in the January 6 attack.
Al Jazeera (2/28/23) noted that “digital rights groups say social media giants,” including X, “have restricted [and] suspended the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists.” Musk has likewise fulfilled censorship requests by the governments of Turkey (Ars Technica, 5/15/23) and India (Intercept, 1/24/23, 3/28/23) officials, and is generally more open to official requests to suppress speech than Twitter‘s previous owners (El Pais, 5/24/23; Washington Post, 9/25/24).
Meanwhile, Musk’s critics contend, he’s allowed the social network to be a force multiplier for the right. “Elon Musk has increasingly used the social media platform as a megaphone to amplify his political views and, lately, those of right-wing figures he’s aligned with,” AP (8/13/24) reported. (Musk is vocal about his support for former President Donald Trump’s candidacy—New York Times, 7/18/24.)
“Twitter Antisemitism ‘Skyrocketed’ Since Elon Musk Takeover—Jewish Groups,” blasted a Newsweek headline (4/25/23). Earlier this year, Mother Jones (3/13/24) reported that Musk “has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents…spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers.”
‘Chilling effect on speech’
Now Musk’s Twitter is keeping certain information out of the public view—information that just happens to damage the presidential ticket he supports. With Klippenstein having been silenced on the network, anyone claiming X is a bastion of free speech at this point is either mendacious or simply deluded.
Klippenstein (Substack, 9/26/24) explained that “X says that I’ve been suspended for ‘violating our rules against posting private information,’ citing a tweet linking to my story about the JD Vance dossier.” He added, though, that “I never published any private information on X.” Rather, “I linked to an article I wrote here, linking to a document of controversial provenance, one that I didn’t want to alter for that very reason.”
The journalist (Substack, 9/27/24) claims that his account suspension, which he reports to be permanent, is political because he did not violate the network’s code about disclosing personal information, and even if he did, he should have been given the opportunity to correct his post to become unsuspended. “So it’s not about a violation of X’s policies,” he said. “What else would you call this but politically motivated?”
Klippenstein is understandably concerned that he is now without a major social media promotional tool. “I no longer have access to the primary channel by which I disseminate primarily news (and shitposts of course) to the general public,” he said. “This chilling effect on speech is exactly why we published the Vance Dossier in its entirety.”
UPDATE: Klippenstein (Substack, 9/29/24) reports that his publication of the Vance dossier is being censored not only by X, but by Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and Google as well: “The platforms said that the alleged Iranian origin of the dossier — which no one is calling fake or altered — necessitated removing any links to the document.”
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'This Is Political,' Journalist Who Published Vance Dossier Says of Permanent X Ban
"It's not about a violation of X's policies," wrote Ken Klippenstein. "What else would you call this but politically motivated?"
Sep 27, 2024
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein said Friday that he was privately informed by the Elon Musk-owned social media platform X that his account has been permanently banned, a decision that Klippenstein argued was "politically motivated."
X, formerly Twitter, suspended Klippenstein on Thursday after he posted to the platform a link to his Substack article containing a download link for a 271-page dossier that Republican nominee Donald Trump's campaign prepared to vet Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), who was ultimately chosen as the former president's running mate.
The dossier, Klippenstein noted, "reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign," and major news outlets such as Politicodeclined opportunities to publish it. The U.S. Justice Department on Friday charged three men with allegedly carrying out a hack against the Trump campaign.
In a statement issued late Thursday afternoon as it faced backlash, X said that "Ken Klippenstein was temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information, specifically Sen. Vance's physical addresses and the majority of his Social Security number."
On Friday, Klippenstein—who has previously worked for The Intercept and The Nation—shared a private message from X informing him that his account is "permanently in read-only mode, which means you can't post, Repost, or Like content" or "create new accounts."
"The two-step dance X is doing here—avoiding further backlash by pretending like my suspension is just a temporary thing, no big deal, while privately suspending me permanently—only makes sense when you consider the political dimensions," Klippenstein wrote on his Substack. "Elon Musk is an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump and JD Vance's political campaign. The Wall Street Journalreported that he promised $45 million a month for a pro-Trump Super PAC (Musk subsequently disputed this). So X clearly doesn't want to give the appearance that my ban was politically motivated. But a careful look at the pretext X cites for my suspension makes it obvious that this is political."
"The media is going to see the case of the Vance dossier and conclude that reporting on similar documents isn't worth losing their social media accounts over."
Observers have noted the obvious parallels between the social media platform's handling of the Vance dossier and a 2020 New York Post story on the contents of Hunter Biden's laptop. At the time, Twitter—not yet under Musk's ownership—placed restrictions on sharing of the Post story, limits that were reversed months later.
Klippenstein noted Friday that Musk—a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist"—was "so incensed by Twitter's previous owners' decision to block the story on its platform that he took the extraordinary step of releasing Twitter's internal correspondence to independent journalist Matt Taibbi so he could report on how the decision came about. (I support his transparency, by the way.)"
"Now, anyone posting a link to my article finds their account locked, which is exactly how Twitter handled the Hunter Biden laptop story by the New York Post," Klippenstein wrote.
Journalist Lee Fang pointed out shortly after Klippenstein's ban that "the Hunter Biden laptop—which had newsworthy info that was fair game—also had personal dox info, far more than this Vance doc."
"The Biden laptop had bank/credit cards, personal addresses, nudity, etc," Fang added. "You can still link to those Biden docs on X, but Vance doc link banned?"
Klippenstein argued that "the biggest tell that this is political" is that X did not offer him a chance to restore his account by removing the post that resulted in his ban, as the platform typically does with users accused of violating its policies.
"As an experiment, last night my editor and I decided to redact all 'private' information from the Vance dossier in my story here at Substack," Klippenstein wrote Friday. "Despite filing an appeal in which I mention this, I remain banned. So it's not about a violation of X's policies. What else would you call this but politically motivated?"
"Boo hoo, poor me, I lost my account. That's not the point here," he continued. "If you were frustrated with the media's refusal to publish the Vance dossier, prepare for a future that's worse. The media is going to see the case of the Vance dossier and conclude that reporting on similar documents isn't worth losing their social media accounts over. Why take the risk when you can just blather on about the horse race? As always, it's the public that loses out the most."
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