Well, today, Twitter decided to suspend journalist Ken Klippenstein over the fact that he posted about a leaked JD Vance dossier. Now we want to understand more about this, especially since this took place on a platform that Elon Musk purchased to the tune of $41 billion [00:00:20] in order to protect free speech to, you know, basically ensure that what happened with the Hunter Biden laptop story never happens again. And so joining us now is the journalist in question, Ken Klippenstein. Thank you for joining us, Ken. [00:00:35] Hey, guys. Good to be back with you. Yeah. Good to have you. Let me let me start with the first question, because I'm dying to know what reasoning were you given for your ban on Twitter. I got an email citing two tweets. One was the link to the JD Vance Research dossier story that I published, [00:00:53] and the second one was more interesting. I also, I also just reposted a story I'd done talking about how overblown I think foreign influence operations are not just by the press, but by the Intelligence Committee, maybe even the culture at large. Not that they don't exist, not that they're, you know, not real, not that the government shouldn't respond to them, but to treat them like, [00:01:11] you know, some dumb Russian memes or Iranian memes or whatever are going to, you know, decisively swing an election. There's no evidence for that. And, you know, in the story I explore that, you know, I look at a report by the Rand Corporation, their scholarship that suggests that, yes, these things happen. Yes, they they have goals. [00:01:27] But when it gets to that question of could it change, you know, not just a senatorial election but a presidential election? No, there's no evidence for that. There's no evidence that's happened. And so for all those reasons, I thought that this was crazy to not talk about this, you know, largely open, containing largely open source information relevant to the American electorate [00:01:44] in an election season that, you know, multiple news outlets knew existed and which contains information about not just the candidate, but about what the Republican Party thinks about that candidate and gives you insight into, What the party thinks. [00:02:00] I mean, that perception. That's what was so interesting to me, especially in an election where it's it's a vibes election. They're not talking about policy. I mean, look at the convention, not just Trump's, but, Harris's the Democrats as well. How much do they actually give you in terms of specifics? So little. So something like this tells you what the party thinks of. [00:02:17] It was kind of interesting because if you go through it, the things that they point out are that, you know, oh, Vance has a, you know, unorthodox position on this or that that is actually pretty popular with their base. And it's clear that the party isn't excited about having to litigate that in a, in a general election. [00:02:33] And so for that reason, I thought it was worth, for those two reasons. The, the, you know, unseriousness of foreign influence efforts and the importance of that information. I thought it was important to report, but evidently Twitter thought that those two things and I don't know what the second one is, because that was just an analysis piece about foreign influence, [00:02:49] but it said that I, what was it violated by posting personal information? Which again, in the second post, there was no personal information. You could say that in the first one there was because in the dossier it includes things like his current and past addresses. So I mean, I get I disagree with that because first of all, [00:03:06] I'm not posting the addresses to Twitter. I'm posting them to the site which is linked to it. And in addition to that, that's all public information. I, as a reporter, can go on Nexus in two minutes and find out a public officials address. That's just that's how and these news organizations do it too. [00:03:21] Corporations do it. All of this information is sold because it's public. There's no law barring it. And they're trying to cast that, I think, as a pretext to take down what is a story which clearly, Elon Musk is the one who's donated billions of dollars to Republican causes, doesn't want out there. And so they have to create a pretext to say, hey, look, it's not actually I [00:03:39] mean, of course they're not going to say, oh, sorry, we don't want to have, you know, something that makes advance look bad. They have to come up with a pretext. And that's what I think this is. So, Ken, I want to get back to you being banned in just a moment. But just a quick sidebar because I think this is important. So you mentioned how other journalists have kind of shied away [00:03:55] from reporting on this. JD Vance dossier because they're worried about being accused of, helping with foreign interference into our elections. Is there any evidence or any indication that this JD Vance dossier was leaked [00:04:11] by a foreign government like Iran? Like I'm hearing about that, but is there any substance to that claim? That's a very interesting question, because if you look closely at what the intelligence community has put out, they haven't said specifically which stories were hacked. Now, I don't doubt for a second that the Iranians are hacking things [00:04:26] and trying to hurt Trump. Trump has a very hard line policy on Iran. It makes sense that they would want to do that. And I take the intelligence community when they make a conclusive statement like that at its word that they're seeing something. But if you go through those statements, they say malign cyber actors are, [00:04:41] you know, targeting the Trump campaign. Okay. All make sense. But they don't say where and which stories. And so I wish that the media would interrogate that and say and press them and say, are you specifically referring to this? And the reason I want them to ask that is not because I'm trying to defend the Iranians, but because if you look back at 2016, [00:04:57] for example, there was a hacker that went by the handle Guccifer or something like that, and he hacked into, I think it was the Democrat. I think it was the Hillary Clinton emails. And contemporaneous with that, the Russians were directing foreign influence operations, targeting, targeting Clinton. [00:05:14] And so both were true at the same time. There was both a foreign nexus to these things. And there was a private individual who, they ended up concluding was just acting. It was just a hacker acting of his own accord. But when the media talked about it, they lumped it all into one basket and said, oh, this is all foreign influence. And the world isn't always that simple. [00:05:31] So, I mean, if you were to ask me my frank opinion because I'm not trying to dodge here, I would say yes, I would guess that the Iranians had a role in it. But the truth is, we don't know, because nobody has pressed the intelligence community to say what specific stories or what specific hacks are you talking about. They just say hacks. And then the media runs with this. [00:05:48] Yeah. So I want to come back to different countries messing with our elections in a second. But first, thank you for joining us in exile. - Oh my God. - You really like that joke, don't you? It's not the first time he said it tonight. Okay, so in all seriousness. Well, not in all seriousness. [00:06:05] Did you consider, saying that you got the JD Vance files from Hunter Biden's laptop? Because then I would have worked. Yeah. I mean, like, one of the reasons Elon Musk. Now, in all seriousness, Elon Musk said that he bought Twitter [00:06:21] was because of free speech. And my God, they didn't put Hunter Biden's laptop on on Twitter right before the election. And how dare they do that decision? And how dare they take their cues from the U.S. Government? Who's telling them, oh, I have secret information on why you should do this. [00:06:37] Isn't this story kind of identical? Hold on. To be fair, the Hunter Biden laptop didn't include any personal information. Nothing like, you know, literal nude photos. And anyway. But go ahead. Ken. I didn't even think of that. [00:06:52] Yeah, but, yeah, I mean, you're seeing conservatives are getting mad at him for this. I saw Nick Fuentes, of all people, which don't agree with him on literally anything, but credit to him, he had the consistency to point out that this is not consistent with their position on the Hunter Biden laptop. I think Tim Pool did too. [00:07:08] A whole cast of people that I agree with on virtually nothing. And that shows you how egregious it is, because people can see through this nonsense about, oh, there was a public this is this is what the campaign is pushing to try to get people not to talk about it and talk about something else, not to talk about the contents and the contents show that, [00:07:25] the party and Vance are at odds on a number of different issues and suggest that there's a fight between them about it, which is really interesting. Right? That's. And if you look at the. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder like if we put this interview up on X, is that going to get banned [00:07:42] is what else is going to get banned. Is does anything that's Ken Klippenstein adjacent get banned. Because you apparently are embarrassing the wrong party and you know, so I mean, this feels like a tipping point for Elon Musk. [00:07:59] No one in their right mind can believe that he cares about free speech anymore. He just wants speech that's on his side, including a lot of the things that he's allowed on Twitter. Racist. ET cetera. Holocaust denial. All of those things are okay on Twitter, but embarrassing Donald Trump [00:08:16] or JD Vance is definitely not okay. And again, the Biden laptop is so relevant because it was like, oh, how do you trust the American government telling you that that's a foreign influence operation? This is literally the American government saying this is a foreign influence [00:08:31] operation and hence Twitter. Take it off, presumably. And Twitter is like, oh, great, I'd love to censor speech for you. So let me play devil's advocate, okay? Because I want to bring up this argument because I do think there's some merit behind it. And I want to give you a chance to obviously respond to this. [00:08:48] So, Ken, you made the decision to avoid redacting like the address for JD Vance in the dossier that you posted on your Substack. Right. And so some are saying that is the reason why Ken Klippenstein was banned. [00:09:05] You know, there are guidelines in the toes for X indicating that you're not supposed to dox people. And this is doxing. And they further claim that, you know, considering the fact that there were two attempts on Donald Trump's life with these would be assassins, you know, [00:09:20] this was irresponsible of you to do. You do write in your Substack about why you made the decision to avoid redacting it. So what do you say to those who have that argument in favor of you getting banned on Twitter? Well, I would say, first of all, all of that information is publicly available. [00:09:36] It was what I was saying at the beginning of the interview. It's stuff you can buy online, and data brokers are selling it on such a massive scale. Companies have it. Media has it. The campaign has it. The campaign that's complaining about this had that information circulated it in in the in the report. [00:09:51] And the reason they have that information isn't because they asked about it. It's it, because they have access to these things just like everyone else, just like I do. If I want to jump on LexisNexis and find something out about somebody. Now, if we don't want to have that kind of a system, the Congress can pass a law regulating it, but they haven't done so. And so the system that we have is one where corporations [00:10:09] and, you know, institutions and powerful people can use that. What the people that can't know these things is general public, and you have to go way out of your way to redact it. I mean, this is a principle I've lived in my personal life. People have posted my address. Nothing has ever happened. I've never complained about it. I mean, I don't like it, but it's kind of like it is public. [00:10:25] That's the system we have. And so I felt wrong in the context of a story that is about full disclosure and giving the public something and trusting them with it and thinking they're adults that can make their own decisions and then excising parts of it. Based on I don't know what the criteria is because there are a bunch of addresses, [00:10:43] like there are business addresses, there are addresses of events. So which one? And they're only complaining about the residential addresses. But where do you draw the line? It's so arbitrary. And to me, I mean, it seems clear to me that this is a pretext. There was no situation in which they were going to be like, yeah, that's a story. [00:10:59] We don't really have anything to say. They were always going to create something to point to and say, hey everybody, it's not about Iran. It's not about this or that. It's about some other, you know, it's not that there's a fight within the party about how unpopular Vance is or how his ideas are not supported by the kind of elite segment of the Republican Party. [00:11:15] They were going to come up with something else. Yeah, in my view, if it wasn't that, it would be something else. Yeah. So on that point. So look, I would have redacted the addresses, but we're different. You're an investigative reporter and I'm a talk show host, but they give away the game. But that's not really their concern when they also banned you over an [00:11:33] innocuous blog explaining all this. Right. So that. Exactly. - Yeah, that there. - Were two posts. One of the posts had nothing to do with any of that in it, and I posted that on my Substack. And I encourage people to go in there and look at it so they can get a sense that shows that there's a political dimension to this, because there was no personal information in the second post that they cited [00:11:50] as being the reason that I was banned. So, Ken, let's actually get into the substance of the dossier because I really want to read it and I plan to read it. So thank you for reporting on it. But just give us some of the highlights. You mentioned that the Republican Party in general doesn't really favor J.D. [00:12:08] Vance. That doesn't surprise me, because J.D. Vance does hold some populist like sincere populist ideas that Republicans despise. So can you be a little more detailed about that? What in particular do they dislike about him? Well, all sorts of foreign policy stuff. [00:12:25] Like he wants to step away from US aid to Ukraine. I mean, it wasn't I mean, the document was long, something like 170 pages. So it wasn't like every single issue, but it was basically it was funny. It's like essentially the MAGA core of his identity was what they seem [00:12:42] to take the most issue with and Nonintervention or the I mean, I wouldn't call it non-interventionism, but, you know, the kind of nativist thrusts, the things that we think about when we think about Trump, the hardline immigration policies. A lot of these things that they seem worried about going into a general election because they're sort of fringe views, as we've seen with with Vance. [00:13:00] It was so interesting to see them acknowledge that internally and to show you that there's a fight within the party, in a sort of similar way to what you saw with Bernie Sanders, the Democrats on the right. And and one of the most interesting parts about reporting on this was seeing [00:13:15] the way in which this document was given to a number of other news outlets, and they paraphrased it and they said, you don't need to see the underlying document. We've paraphrased it. You basically know everything that's in there. What's the big deal? You look at the document, there's a whole lot of stuff that they didn't mention. And that's the problem with what I call trust us journalism, where you can just, you know, we I went to journalism school, I went to Columbia. [00:13:33] I know what you're going to be interested in. How could they even if they're trying? I'm not saying these are bad people. I know a lot of them. They are doing their best, but they have a certain outlook, just like I do, and they're going to notice certain things. And so if you don't give people the underlying information, you're you're at their mercy to understand what happened. [00:13:49] And again, I encourage people go through the document and compare it with the reporting that purported to summarize what was in that document. You'll notice a big difference between those two things. Yeah, I. Noticed one thing because I think that JD Vance is a fake populist, but I was actually surprised. In fact, I think that for me, I didn't get a chance to read the whole 271 page thing [00:14:08] because he released it earlier today. Right. But, the part that I read about how he didn't he thought it was a bad idea to assassinate General Soleimani because he thought he could actually create a bigger war in the Middle East. That's an Iranian general that Trump assassinated. [00:14:24] I was like, really behind the scenes. He actually objected to that. That made me think that he was real in being an anti-war candidate, which I never believed before. So. So this isn't just about smearing JD Vance? [00:14:39] No, this gives a full picture and some of it might be helpful to JD Vance, but you're never going to know that if you don't actually reveal the document. And you have to your point, like establishment media guys summarize it. They're not going to put that in there. They don't even think that's noteworthy when it's in reality enormously noteworthy [00:14:58] and actually is to the benefit of JD Vance. Totally. And and, you know, paints a complex picture that doesn't fit this kind of we have this dichotomy of like, there's the grifters and then there's the good people. The reality is a lot of people in politics lie somewhere in between those two poles, perhaps, I would say very far to the grifter end. [00:15:16] But, you know, it's not 100%. And things like that give you a sense of, in the context of an election that we're again, go and look at the convention. They mentioned the word healthcare once or twice in each of them. I'm not exaggerating. I did a story on this. [00:15:31] I did a little keyword search of the convention speeches of both the Republicans and the Democrats. It was 1 or 2 times that they mentioned it. There's no policy in this election. It's all vibes. And so documents like these give us a sense of what the heck is going on when not just not just the people running aren't saying anything, [00:15:47] but the media isn't pressing them to say anything either, and they allow them to fall back on this kind of vague, feel good nonsense. I totally agree with you on that. It's. And I love that we have the opportunity to read the actual source material and not rely on, you know, a summarized narrative that some journalist has decided [00:16:05] is worth knowing about. But the other thing that I love about your reporting here, Ken, is that it's touching on what I think is one of the most fascinating political phenomenons happening on the right, which is this disconnect between the Republican elite [00:16:22] and the voting base, the electorate. You know, you hear from some of the more traditional conservative Republicans, you know, those who are more in line with the neocons of the Bush administration, really like pushing back against Trump and hoping that once the election is over [00:16:39] and if Kamala Harris gets elected, well, that's it. Trump is is over. But no, I don't think Trumpism is over because that voting base still exists. And what they are craving from their party is very different from the naysayers who were against JD Vance in this dossier. [00:16:57] So I'm just really curious to see how that plays out. Do you have any indication that JD Vance is aware that the political elite within the party are very much against him, and where he stands on some of these issues? I would imagine he has to be right. [00:17:12] I mean, he's they're in a tough spot where they can't run a Romney again, who's just kind of like straight center. I mean, as much as cable news would have you believe that that's overwhelmingly popular, it's not. People hate it. People hate that center, you know, tax cuts and get rid of all the social, [00:17:28] you know, services and and just, you know, trust us on the, you know, national security consensus on a war that's failed since nine over 11 on wars that have failed since nine over 11. People throw that out. But so then they have to, you know, run on some amount of deviation from the norm which people are appropriately, [00:17:44] appropriately critical of because, you know, Trump doesn't deliver on all the stuff he says. As and you know, that's the case with many politicians. But so so they have to differentiate themselves from that Romney kind of center figure. And then they're in a tough spot where the differentiation is going to rub [00:18:00] up against the elite donors in the party, who who are the reason that these unpopular centrist opinions to take the foothold that they do in these, in these candidates. - Yeah. - Ken, last thing here. We've got the in my opinion, the absurdity of, you know, [00:18:18] both the intelligence officials, the United States government and the media telling us, oh my God, Iran might have done this hack and gotten the JD Vance files. That is just a foreign government interfering with our elections. It's terrible. Russia. 4 million Twitter impressions, which is probably more. [00:18:36] You probably had more on this tweet before they banned you. And back in 2016, this is unacceptable. Meanwhile, we have AIPAC and Democratic majority for Israel, and they both have Israel in their names and their spending over $100 million in this election cycle. [00:18:52] Yeah, I get it's legal, but it doesn't mean that they are not trying to purchase politicians in our system on behalf of a foreign government. Does anybody ever even note that in media, or do they all think like that's. Of course that's a of course you should. [00:19:10] Israel should interfere and buy off all of our politicians. But but we don't like Iran and Russia, so they shouldn't. I mean, how do they. Does anybody even realize it, let alone justify it? Whenever they talk about foreign interference, you'll notice they always mention it's like the usual suspects they bring in to throw in jail. [00:19:26] It's always three countries. It's China, Iran, Russia and sometimes North Korea. What they will never mention ever. I can't find a single example of it. I've been studying this for years. Now is when a partner like Israel does it, which they do, and which we know they do from reporting, they will never mention that. [00:19:42] And so you have within the intelligence community, there's something called the Foreign Malign Influence Center. They recently had a private briefing with some members of the press where they described the threats from foreign influence, and I encourage people to Google this. I can't remember the name of the title, the title of the story, but it was in NBC news. They described how a reporter asked, okay, so what about Israeli influence, though? [00:20:01] Because there was a story in the times recently about how through the Israelis, I think it was like the Cultural Affairs Ministry or something they were pushing they were pushing disinformation within the US, targeting lawmakers to vote a certain way on the on the Gaza war. Or maybe it was on US military aid to Israel. [00:20:18] I think it was. So we know that these things happen. We know the government finances them. That was the New York Times. And what the malign foreign malign Influence Center said was, oh, you know, well, we don't really talk about partners. They just said this and this was in NBC. It was like the middle of the article. So not only do they not mention it when on the rare occasion they're pressed, [00:20:36] they just give up the game and say, yeah, we don't really we're you know, obviously we don't want to talk about that. And it's like, well, isn't that part of the equation of of people influencing. So does influence matter or not. If there's certain reasons that you're going to overlook it, why not overlook these other inefficacious, forms of influence? [00:20:54] And there's just there's no discussion of any of this. Yeah. So we just found out that Israel's Bruno. We don't. Do we talk about Bruno? No, no, no. Okay. So. All right, Ken Klippenstein, joining us from exile from Twitter. And we wish you luck and hope that you rejoin the island. [00:21:14] And that, hypocrisy is vanquished. Well, more. Importantly, everyone, please go check out Ken's amazing Substack. Ken, tell us a little bit more so people can find you there. Well, stories like these are exactly the reason I went independent. I mean, they make people queasy. They invite all sorts of nasty attacks. [00:21:32] They are difficult to get through the kind of bureaucracy of many news outlets, which is not my opinion, which is that's what we saw here. Do you know how many outlets had this story and wouldn't run it? Not one. They couldn't find one. It's crazy, so I didn't. I feel as though I didn't have much choice. But one of the exciting things about going independent is being able to do that and [00:21:49] not have to worry about all the barriers that would have been in place before. So I really enjoy writing it. I like doing it. I have a live chat that I participate in close to every day, where we just talk about different things, and it's a lot of fun to learn from readers. So please, if you if you have a second, check that out. Awesome. Yeah. [00:22:05] And obviously when Ken talks about the freedom to publish those things independent of former places he's worked with, he obviously doesn't mean the Young Turks or he means the other guys. The other guys were problematic. - The non YouTube shows. - All right, all right. [00:22:21] Former investigative reporter for TYT Ken Klippenstein. We appreciate you brother. Thanks, guys. Bye. Thanks for watching the video guys. We also love it if you hit the join button below because that makes you a member. And members allow us to be independent, honest. We can be as progressive as we want. No corporate media influence. And that's all because of you guys. [00:22:39] We love doing the show with our members. Hit the join button, become one of the Young Turks.