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Ken Klippenstein, a journalist who previously worked at The Intercept before starting his own Substack, published an internal document from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign Thursday. The document was allegedly stolen by hackers tied to the Iranian government before being shopped around to various news outlets that all refused to publish the material. But Klippenstein published the entire 271-page document and we’re sad to say it’s incredibly boring. What’s more interesting is that Klippenstein was suspended from Elon Musk’s social media platform X shortly after publishing the document.
A spokesperson for X told Gizmodo that Klippenstein “was not suspended for posting the materials as a whole,” claiming there were specific issues within the document shared by the journalist. Previously, “hacked” materials have been allowed on the platform.
“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,” the spokesperson told Gizmodo over email.
The locations of Vance’s homes are easy enough to find online, especially since news outlets have written stories about how left-leaning his neighborhood in Alexandria, Virginia, happens to be. As for the social security number, Gizmodo found it in the document and it appears to be a handful of numbers that don’t include the last four digits.
On top of the suspension, it also appears that trying to share a link to Klippenstein’s Substack post is now impossible. Anyone who tries to post a tweet with that link gets an error that reads, “Something went wrong, but don’t fret — let’s give it another shot.”
The error message seen by anyone trying to share an article by Ken Klippenstein on Stubstack. Screenshot: Twitter Klippenstein didn’t immediately respond to questions sent through Signal on Thursday. The journalist’s Bluesky account hasn’t posted anything in four days, though links to the article can be sent freely on that platform.
What’s actually inside the document published by Klippenstein on Substack? Nothing interesting, if we’re being honest. It’s a 271-page document that appears to have been compiled to vet JD Vance, the senator from Ohio who’s now Trump’s running mate. It includes a lot of anti-Trump comments Vance made in 2016 and plenty of opinions Vance has expressed on everything from tax policy to immigration. But the vast majority of the document is just information from public news articles.
The elements that aren’t just news clippings include some voter registration information, investment information, and property tax records. But it’s all very boring. There’s also an analysis of Vance’s strengths and weaknesses as a potential candidate—at least how the Trump campaign sees it. Vance has previously opposed the repeal of the Affordable Care Act and urged against cuts to Medicaid, positions the Trump folks clearly thought were bad.
As just one small sample from the document:
Vance’s stances on healthcare reveal further deviations from the conservative playbook, as he opposed the Trump Administration’s efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. Expressing concern for those potentially losing access to healthcare, Vance urged against Medicaid cuts. On environmental issues, Vance acknowledges climate concerns and dismisses the return of coal jobs.
Really riveting stuff there. After lots of stories from outlets like Politico explaining why they weren’t going to publish hacked material, it turns out they had very little incentive as journalists to publish something so lame.
Screenshot: Twitter Remember when Republicans insisted it was some kind of conspiracy that major news outlets weren’t publishing the material from Hunter Biden’s stolen laptop? In reality, the person who was holding onto that laptop, Rudy Giuliani, wasn’t letting any mainstream reporters see it to verify its authenticity. But that was clearly part of the scam so that Republicans could cry foul that journalists weren’t reporting on this thing they had no access to.
Right-wing influencers like Malaysia-based Ian Miles Cheong were quick to defend Musk and the ban on Klippenstein, insisting that the journalist had invaded Vance’s personal privacy and “doxxed” him.
“Publishing information from a foreign adversary that was obtained through criminal means for the sake of interfering in the election should result in him getting banned,” Cheong wrote on X.
Obviously, all of the people defending the suspension of Klippenstein were perfectly happy when the material that was hacked by a foreign adversary was someone like Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, who had their emails hacked by Russia and published by WikiLeaks. And, again, Hunter Biden’s laptop was filled with private information, including nude photos that people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene shared publicly.
Musk has repeatedly called himself a champion of free speech while suppressing the speech of people he doesn’t like. And when Musk took over Twitter he invited right-wing journalists to come and rummage through internal documents and report on different communications the social media company had with various federal agencies. Dubbed “The Twitter Files,” these reports demonstrated that agencies like the Department of Homeland Security would sometimes flag material they objected to, a standard practice for all the Big Tech companies. Twitter was never under any obligation to remove anything unless it was clearly illegal.
To make matters even funnier, if you try to visit X’s posted rules on hacked content, it appears to give a 404 at the moment. The policy on hacked materials used to be available earlier this year, according to snapshots captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Musk has turned Twitter into a cesspool of far-right hatred, amplifying the most extreme voices while he openly shills for Trump. And while this is very much a nothingburger of a leak, it will lead to obvious questions about whether Musk is trying to protect Trump in some way.
