Ken Klippenstein


Ken Klippenstein is an American journalist and author working in Washington, DC as the DC Correspondent at The Nation. His work has appeared in The Nation, The Daily Beast, Salon, The Intercept, and other publications. He is a former correspondent on the online news program The Young Turks and reports on U.S. federal and national security matters as well as corporate controversies.

Education, career and focus

Klippenstein graduated from Wheaton College in 2010 with a BA in English literature and his early journalism career began in Madison, Wisconsin. His work with The Young Turks started as early as 2018. In 2020, Klippenstein joined The Nation as their DC correspondent.
Klippenstein is a self-described "FOIA nerd"; much of his journalism draws on information he has uncovered from records requested at state and national levels of the US government. His articles also frequently include information from leaked documents. For instance, he obtained leaked documents from the PR firm Qorvis, which implicated the company pitching the private company Caliburn on a propaganda video in order to improve the reputation of Caliburn's Homestead, a Florida shelter for "unaccompanied alien children". In an April 2020 article, Klippenstein reported on a leaked document showing that Pentagon had warned the White House in 2017 about the risk of shortages and ill-preparation for a pandemic brought on by a novel coronavirus such as SARS-CoV-2. Klippenstein, along with Talia Lavin and Noelle Llamas, is also currently a plaintiff in a lawsuit against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He invites individuals to leak information to him via the encrypted messaging service Signal on his Twitter profile.

Controversies

Klippenstein has occasionally been the subject of reporting himself, notably following a Twitter flame war between him and Tesla CEO Elon Musk; Klippenstein attracted Musk's attention by sharing a Vogue photo from the 2014 Vanity Fair Oscars afterparty showing Musk with Ghislaine Maxwell, a long-time associate of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Musk, who as of July 31, 2020, had 37.3 million Twitter followers, publicly posted that Klippenstein was a "douche-about-town."
In July 2019, Klippenstein was covered by NBC News Digital after a Twitter incident in which he was retweeted by Iowa Representative Steve King just before changing his Twitter username to "Steve King is a white supremacist."