not now, not anymore, not on Elon's watch

Fuck around and find out, motherfuckers!

Headline:

Lefty Journo Publishes Iran-Hacked Vance Dossier, Gets Booted by Twitter

Pop quiz, hotshot: You're an influential media figure in the political arena. Iranian hackers contact you to hand off intel about a candidate you detest. (Or Russian hackers, North Korean hackers, Columbia U hackers ... choose your own betes noires.) Do you wonder whether you're being played by malevolent foreign governments, or do you just hit 'publish'?

Ken Klippenstein chose Door Number 2, and one has to suspect that a lot of media hotshots would have done the same. But he has an explanation for it!

It reportedly comes from an alleged Iranian government hack of the Trump campaign, and since June, the news media has been sitting on it (and other documents), declining to publish in fear of finding itself at odds with the government’s campaign against “foreign malign influence.” 

I disagree. The dossier has been offered to me and I’ve decided to publish it because it’s of keen public interest in an election season. It’s a 271-page research paper the Trump campaign prepared to vet now vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself. ...

If the document had been hacked by some “anonymous” like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combatting foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.

That sounds very high-minded. And to be honest, it could be, but ... one suspects that this was at best a secondary motivation for this decision. In fairness, it's tough to say whether any other journalist would choose Door Number One, at least on a consistent basis. Reportedly, some media outlets did refuse to publish it; the Biden-Harris campaign(s?) chose to ignore it too, at least until now. 

But is that because of high-mindedness, or just simply because the information isn't terribly noteworthy, except as evidence of the hack itself? Klippenstein cops to the latter, noting that almost everything of substance on Vance is already in the public domain:

This is not the Steele Dossier of 2016, with its golden showers and anti-Trump fanfiction. Unlike the Steele Dossier, which was both fraudulent and discredited, the Vance Dossier is factual and intelligently written. No Jason Bourne style capers appear, and there’s no sleaze. Instead, the Vance Dossier enumerates pretty reasonable liabilities as a then-contender for VP nominee...

The Trump campaign advisers who wrote the dossier appreciate the compliment, I'm sure. But that doesn't explain why Klippenstein himself didn't take out the page of the document with Vance's partially redacted Social Security number, home address, and his cell phone number and email address. Klippenstein has since redacted that data, but the first release had all of that data exposed. (I have the original version downloaded.)  What purpose does it serve to make those public, other than to enable harassment? It certainly doesn't serve any high-minded journalistic purpose.

And that prompts the question of publishing the file at all. Perhaps it has some value as a research document, which was its original purpose for the Trump campaign. It could make a handy reference for the next 40-plus days, I suppose. But why bother, when a well-crafted Google search could probably produce the same data? Or more, and better data?

This has the feel of a scoop for the sake of claiming a scoop, and even then an unearned scoop at best.

[ ... ]

Or perhaps that will be the second-biggest effect, in terms of immediacy. Klippenstein promoted his scoop on the hacked material on Twitter/X, which promptly suspended his account:

The X (formerly Twitter) account of journalist Ken Klippenstein was suspended Thursday after he shared details of a dossier about Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) that Iran allegedly hacked.

"Here's the dossier the media refused to publish," Klippenstein wrote in a post on X soon before his account was suspended. ...

X CEO Elon Musk has previously likened the alleged suppression of stories about Hunter Biden's laptop to election interference. 

Read the whole thing. Journalists who think they can keep getting away with lying and spinning will now start facing at least some consequences, thank Cthulhu.