The X, formerly known as Twitter, account of journalist Ken Klippenstein was suspended on Thursday following the release of a dossier about Sen. JD Vance that was allegedly from an Iranian government hack.
“Here’s the dossier the media refused to publish,” Klippenstein wrote in a post earlier.
Klippenstein, who is a former reporter at Intercept, published the dossier to his substack website about three hours prior to the account suspension on Thursday. It is still available to be viewed at the time this article was published.
Ken Klippenstein/AP Photo/Nell Redmond
“The dossier has been offered to me and I’ve decided to publish it because it’s of keen public interest in an election season,” Klippenstein wrote. “It’s a 271-page research paper the Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. 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.”
Newsweek reached out to Klippenstein and X via email for comment but did not hear back in time for publication.
The dossier goes through personal information about Vance, his campaign finances during his run for senate, voting records, military records, business records and his “anti-Trump record and establishment ties.”
It includes information that said Vance was “one of the chief obstructionists to US efforts to providing assistance to Ukraine,” as well as having “criticized public health experts and elected officials for support Black Lives Matter protests while condemning anti-lockdown [Covid] protests.”
The dossier also said that Vance “previously criticized the idea of a Southern border wall,” called illegal immigration “about money,” and that he “opposed Trump’s Muslim ban.”
Newsweek reached out to the former President Donald Trump and Vance campaign for comment
The Dossier also mentions Vance’s wife Usha, who clerked for Kavanaugh.
The FBI announced in July that Iran had allegedly been separately plotting to kill the former president. Federal officials later revealed that Iran had hacked and stolen confidential information from the Trump campaign.
Iranian officials have denied involvement in any plot to assassinate Trump and called the hacking accusation “unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing.”
“Such allegations are unsubstantiated and devoid of any standing,” the Iranian Mission to the United Nations said in a statement shared with Newsweek. “As we have previously announced, the Islamic Republic of Iran harbors neither the intention nor the motive to interfere with the U.S. presidential election.
In August, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) identified “increasingly aggressive Iranian activity during this election cycle, specifically involving influence operations targeting the American public and cyber operations targeting presidential campaigns.”
“This includes the recently reported activities to compromise former President Trump’s campaign, which the IC [intelligence community] attributes to Iran,” the statement said.
Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News‘ Jesse Watters Primetime that Iran should “pay a price” for allegedly targeting Trump and attempting to “undermine” the 2024 presidential election.
Klippenstein said the intelligence community wouldn’t confirm if the Vance dossier was part of the stolen campaign materials.
The documents come from a person Klippenstein called “Robert,” who told the journalist that his motives for releasing the documents “doesn’t matter.”
“Let the media and the authorities go ahead with their own guesses and bullshits [sic],” Klippenstein said “Robert” told him. “I just want to shine some light into the dark room.”
