The Trump campaign was linked to Elon Musk's X before blocking links to hacked materials

new York
CNN
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Former President Donald Trump's campaign was in touch with Elon Musk's X last month to discuss hacked Trump campaign materials that were circulating on the social media platform, before published, blocked, a person familiar with the matter told CNN.

The research dossier released by Ken Klippenstein, allegedly the result of an Iranian government-backed hacking operation, included internal communications from a senior Trump campaign official and materials the campaign compiled on Sen. JD Vance before Trump named him his running mate. The dossier released by Klippenstein contained some of Vance's personal information, including his home address and part of his Social Security number.

After publishing the dossier on Substack last month, Klippenstein said his X account had been suspended for violating the platform's rules on publishing private information. A spokesman for

A person familiar with the matter told CNN on Friday that the Trump campaign spoke with representatives of X about the hacked materials before it suspended Klippenstein and blocked links to his newsletter. The person said the campaign did not pressure X officials to remove links to the materials and that X made the decision. A spokesman for X did not respond to a CNN request for comment.

The New York Times first reported on the Trump campaign's correspondence with X officials in an article about Musk “putting everything into action” to get Trump elected.

During Klippenstein's contribution to the aggressive suppression of the dossier

“Our policies do not allow content from hacked sources or content leaked as part of a foreign government operation to influence U.S. elections,” a Meta spokesperson said in a statement at the time. “We will block the sharing of such materials on our apps in accordance with our community standards.”

Klippenstein was hardly the only recipient of the dossier. In July, Politico pointed out that its reporters had received emails from a person offering a similar trove of private documents from the Trump campaign. Both The Times and The Washington Post also reported that they had been contacted by a person with campaign information. All three media outlets ultimately decided against publishing the materials, which were later reported to be the result of a hacker attack.

Hunter Biden's move. Company executives later said they regretted the decision, and Twitter's lawyers later wrote that the government did not use coercion or censorship.

Musk announced his takeover of Twitter in 2022, which he later announced in But the ban on Klippenstein and the suppression of all links to his newsletter related to the Trump campaign raise questions about the Musk-owned platform's favoritism towards Trump.

As CNN previously reported, Musk regularly uses his X pulpit to promote the former president's candidacy to his 201 million followers. Musk has also given tens of millions of dollars to a pro-Trump super PAC he created to re-elect Trump.

Musk recently appeared alongside Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania and this week told conspiracy theorist Tucker Carlson that he “denigrates Kamala (Harris) non-stop” and that if Trump loses the election, “I'm screwed.”