Incident details
- Date of incident
- October 11, 2024
- Targets
- Ken Klippenstein (Independent)
FBI vehicles parked in front of the bureau’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. Journalist Ken Klippenstein was visited by FBI agents at his home in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 2024 and in May 2025.
Journalist gets a second FBI visit after publishing shooter’s manifesto
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein was visited by two FBI agents at his home in Madison, Wisconsin, on May 22, 2025, the second time in a year that the agency questioned him there.
Klippenstein wrote on his Substack that the “aggressive and threatening” visit was related to his publication that day of a manifesto written by the man charged with fatally shooting two staff members of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Klippenstein wrote that the agents asked him how he had obtained the manifesto and whether he had been in communication with its author before the shooting. Klippenstein said that he referred all questions to his attorney, who then received a voicemail message and later an emailed list of questions from one of the agents.
In October 2024, an FBI agent visited Klippenstein in connection with his publication of a dossier about Vice President JD Vance, notifying the journalist that he “was a target of a foreign influence campaign.”
In his post about the May 2025 visit, Klippenstein accused the Trump administration of “labeling seemingly everything terrorism.”
“Get ready to hear that I’m impeding the investigation, giving people a roadmap to the ‘sources and methods’ that are used to catch terrorists, or whatever reason the national security state soundboard offers up for why the public isn’t allowed to know things,” he wrote.
Reached by email, the FBI declined to comment to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker.
Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein was visited at his Madison, Wisconsin, home by an FBI special agent on Oct. 11, 2024, in connection with his publication of a dossier about Donald Trump’s running mate, JD Vance.
Klippenstein, who said the bureau visit could be interpreted as an effort to chill his reporting, published the dossier Sept. 26, writing that the vetting document was reportedly hacked from the Trump campaign by the Iranian government and that other journalists had declined to publish it.
Two weeks later, Klippenstein told the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, an FBI agent from a satellite office in nearby Middleton came to his home to read him a one-paragraph statement notifying him that he “was a target of a foreign influence campaign.”
“When he finished reading it, I looked at him and said, ‘Oh, yeah, I know. I put that in the story. I tried to inform readers that this is very likely an Iranian cyberactor trying to propagate these hacked documents. So, given that I wrote that in the article and I know all this, why did you come out here to notify me?’” Klippenstein recounted. “And he didn’t have an answer to that question, he just kind of shrugged.”
The agent wouldn’t allow him to take a picture of the statement or write notes, Klippenstein recounted, but said he’d try to have a copy emailed to the journalist. Klippenstein told the Tracker he never received such an email, and the FBI didn’t respond to his request for comment about the procedure behind such notifications.
“He said to me, ‘You’re not in trouble.’ And then I’m thinking, ‘OK. Well, why then? What is the point of this? I know I didn’t break any laws here,” he said. “The FBI has a notification system for foreign influence stuff, but I don’t think there’s any public evidence that that had happened to press before.”
In an article Klippenstein published on his Substack page, he said the purpose of the visit was clear.
“America’s most powerful law enforcement agency wants me to know it was displeased,” he wrote. “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.
A spokesperson for the FBI declined to comment when reached by the Tracker.
The U.S. Press Freedom Tracker catalogues press freedom violations in the United States. Email tips to [email protected].
