Independent journalist Ken Klippenstain said that the FBI came to his home after publishing a report on Republica vice presidential nominee JD Vance using materials allegedly obtained through an Iranian hack.
“The Bureau told me that I had been the target of a foreign influence operation with regard to a news article I had written, a clear reference to my publication of the JD Vance Dossier,” journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote on his Substack page of the visit the FBI paid to his Madison, Wis. home.
Klippenstein did not say exactly when the FBI visited him but noted the agent he spoke with came with “no subpoena, no search warrant, no prior announcement, no claim of illegality.”
“America’s most powerful law enforcement agency wants me to know that it was displeased. It is delivering what many would consider a chilling message: we know where you live, we know what you’ve done, we are watching,” he wrote. “This is how out of control the disinformation and foreign influence hysteria has become.”
Klippenstein’s most recent Substack post comes just days after the journalist was briefly suspended from X, the platform formerly known as Twitter after he published a 271-page report compiled by the Trump campaign to vet Vance, the Ohio senator and Trump’s running mate.
X said at the time that the dossier contained “unredacted private personal information” about Vance, and that Kippenstein’s post justified a suspension of his account.
“I knew and acknowledged in the story that it had probably come from Tehran. This placed me at odds with the entirety of major media, which in an extraordinary act of self-censorship declined to publish the dossier,” Klippenstein wrote this week. “The FBI and the federal government has now successfully enlisted the mainstream news media into being some kind of adjunct national security agency. That is the major threat to our democracy. Not some foreign government’s hijinks.”
