The Trump campaign reportedly reached out to X, the platform owned by MAGA billionaire Elon Musk, to suppress a report about the leaked dossier of Republican vice presidential nominee Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH ) that was allegedly obtained in an Iranian hack on the former president’s campaign.
Last month, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein published the report on X compiled by the Trump campaign to vet Vance.
Musk’s platform responded by blocking users from posting links to Klippenstein’s newsletter and suspended his account .
“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,” an X spokesperson said at the time, conveniently failing to explain why users were unable to share links to the journalist’s newsletter.
On Friday, the New York Times reported that the Trump campaign had reached out to X to suppress the story.
“After a reporter’s publication of hacked Trump campaign information last month, the campaign connected with X to prevent the circulation of links to the material on the platform,” the Times reported citing two people with knowledge of the events.
The move by X to suppress the story under Musk’s leadership is ironic given that he slammed the previous owners of the platform for taking similar steps after a report was published about Hunter Biden’s laptop before the 2020 presidential election.
Twitter had removed links to the New York Post story at the time saying that the information was “obtained through hacking” and “contains private information.”
Musk, who was in the final stages of acquiring Twitter at the time, slammed the decision as “incredibly inappropriate.”
Once he took over the platform, Musk launched the so-called ‘Twitter Files,” a series of reports by a set of journalist he handpicked to examine internal communication as the platform worked to suppress the story pre-Musk.
Though Musk and his allies in the Republican party, hyped the reports, claiming they exposed government censorship, experts and even Twitter’s lawyers say the files did not amount to much.
