Journalist says FBI visited after he published hacked Vance document

An independent journalist says he was visited by the FBI after he published material allegedly obtained through an Iranian hack of former President Trump’s campaign. 

“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 when the FBI visited him but noted the agent he spoke to 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 the social platform X after he published a 271-page report compiled by the Trump campaign to vet Vance, the Ohio senator and Trump’s running mate.

An X spokesperson said at the time the dossier contained “unredacted private personal information” about Vance, and that Kippenstein’s post justified a suspension of his account.

The FBI declined to comment when contacted by Klippenstein’s press inquiry about the visit to his home, he said.

“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.”