Jason Leopold is a U.S. investigative journalist, currently at Bloomberg, previously at Vice and the Los Angeles Times. John Kiriakou describes him as “absolutely brilliant. He’s a gifted writer. He’s a dogged investigator and breaks big stories. He’s the one who broke the Hillary Clinton email server story.”[1]
Method
Leopold’s signature technique is the use of large-scale Freedom of Information Act requests, followed by lawsuits when the receiving agency fails to respond within the statutory window. “He files these gigantic Freedom of Information Act requests knowing that the agency is never going to respond within the 60 days or 90 days or whatever it is. And so he sues them every time and he wins every time.”[1][2]
The CIA Office of Public Affairs FOIA
Leopold filed a FOIA request for all correspondence between the Central Intelligence Agency’s Office of Public Affairs and American journalists over a defined date range. The CIA declined to respond; the resulting judgment compelled the disclosure of the full correspondence. Two documented findings from the disclosure:
- Threats in lieu of recruitment. A reporter who had written a story considered unfavorable received an email warning that publication would result in permanent loss of the Christmas-party invitation list and of any future agency comment on the reporter’s stories. The reporter withdrew.[3]
- Pre-publication clearance. Ken Dilanian, the chief national-security correspondent at NBC and MSNBC, was found to have sent his own articles to the CIA for clearance before sending them to his own editor.[4]