Jason Leopold

On 18 January 2019, Leopold co-authored an explosive report that alleged Donald Trump directed his personal lawyer Michael D. Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow tower project, a construction deal at the heart of an investigation by the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. The report attracted attention because such an action by Trump would constitute a felony. Democratic congressmen publicly mused impeachment.

The Washington Post opined that Michael Cohen's testimony to the House Oversight Committee largely confirmed the thrust of the report but contradicted key details. After its release, National Review noted that the Mueller report directly refutes Leopold's Buzzfeed article, saying "evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen’s false testimony."

Leopold is an Emmy nominated producer, the recipient of the FOI Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors and a member of the team awarded the Tom Renner Award in 2018 from Investigative Reporters and Editors, and a member of the team named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. Leopold was inducted into the National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame by the Newseum Institute in 2016.

Leopold worked at Vice News from 2014 to 2017. His prolific use of the Freedom of Information Act has caused him to be labeled a "FOIA terrorist". He is the journalist whose Freedom of Information Act lawsuit forced the State Department to release all of Hillary Clinton's emails on a monthly basis. He has been widely noted in the media as responsible for sensitive information disclosures including abusive treatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

In 2011, Truthout featured a story by Leopold about religious material used by the US Air Force in the training of officers on the ethics of nuclear war. The material, obtained by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation from Freedom of Information Act requests, includes slides quoting the Bible supporting the act of war and characters from the Bible fighting what the slides refer to as just wars, as well as quotes from former Nazi Wernher von Braun. The Air Force removed the material from its training regime a day after Leopold's story was published, with David Smith, chief of public affairs of Air Education and Training Command, telling Leopold (The material) "has been taken out of the curriculum and is being reviewed," and "The commander reviewed it and decided we needed to have a good hard look at it and make sure it reflected views of modern society."

60 Minutes cited a report by Leopold, published at Truthout as a source for their episode on May 16, 2010, about the BP oil spill and the whistleblower who was warning about a possible blowout at another BP deepwater drilling site. Digital Journal wrote up the story and also cited the Truthout report. CNN's Randi Kaye in an article also cited a report by Leopold on Mark Kovak's inside knowledge about the safety concerns at the Prudhoe Bay, Alaska BP oil field. On July 8, 2010, Los Angeles Times reporter Kim Murphy cited Leopold's investigation into neglect and cost-cutting practices at Alyeska Pipeline in her report on the resignation of Alyeska's CEO one day after Leopold's report was published at Truthout. On July 14, 2010, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure held a hearing in the Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials. The hearing, titled "The Safety of Hazardous Liquid Pipelines (Part 2): Integrity Management," cited an investigative report by Leopold, published at Truthout as a document for the committee's investigation.

In 2010 Leopold and psychologist and human rights worker Jeffrey Kaye requested information on the use of psycho-active drugs on Guantanamo captives. Captives and former captives had been reporting medical staff collaborating with interrogators to drug captives with powerful psychoactive drugs prior to interrogation since the very first captives release. The report from the Pentagon Inspector General was declassified, and in which the Pentagon concludes that the injections were flu shots, IV hydration (sometimes post-hunger strike), and medical treatment with or without consent, and "were not mind-altering drugs for interrogation purposes". The report does say that a detainee was given a routine flu shot, and was told that the shot was a truth serum or Hallucinogen "as a ruse".

In 2008, Leopold received the Thomas Jefferson Award from the Military Religious Freedom Foundation.

Publishers Weekly wrote of News Junkie that "While there's a lot of lying admitted to in this scrappy memoir, from Leopold's hiding of his criminal past to his playing of sources to get his scoops, it's (probably) not an untruthful memoir—indeed, it might become required reading for aspiring journalists." The book was on the Los Angeles Times' Bestsellers / Paperbacks list on June 11, 2006 and July 16, 2006.

On May 13, 2006, Leopold reported on Truthout that Karl Rove had been indicted by the grand jury investigating the Plame affair. Rove spokesman Mark Corallo denied the story, calling it "a complete fabrication". Truthout vigorously defended the story saying variously that it had two or three "independent sources", before the executive director, Marc Ash, issued a statement apologizing for “getting too far out in front of the news-cycle”. The grand jury concluded with no indictment of Rove.

His stories have appeared three times on Project Censored's top-25 under-reported stories of the year: once in 2004, for a story he wrote about an alleged secret meeting Arnold Schwarzenegger had with Ken Lay prior to the film star's being elected Governor of California, for a story he wrote on Halliburton in 2005, and again in 2011 for a story he wrote on a controversial "spiritual fitness test" the Army required all of its enlisted soldiers.

Leopold was referred to as "one of the most aggressive reporters" on the California energy crisis by Jill Stewart, a columnist for the now-defunct New Times LA newspaper in Los Angeles. An article Leopold wrote for CBS Marketwatch about Enron's role in the California energy crisis was cited during a floor speech by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and read into the Congressional Record on June 10, 2003, as Congress was debating energy policy.

In September 2002, following a two-week investigation, Salon removed from its website an article authored by Leopold about Army Secretary Thomas E. White's role in the Enron collapse, due to questions about the validity of an e-mail and allegations that portions of the article had not been adequately credited to the Financial Times. The disputed e-mail was said to have been from White, telling the recipient to "Close a bigger deal to hide the loss." According to Salon, Leopold's article "used seven full paragraphs amounting to 480 words, virtually verbatim, from the FT. There were two attributions to the FT within the passage, but they appeared to apply only to the specific sentences that contained them, not to the full passage." Leopold later admitted that he had been careless by not providing the FT with additional credit, but insisted that Salon' s editors had all the relevant documents, including the disputed White email, before the story was published. Paul Krugman of The New York Times, who wrote a piece based in part on Leopold's work, also had to backpedal, acknowledging that he should not have cited the e-mail.

Leopold's reporting on Enron was featured in a National Public Radio special broadcast, "Blind Trust." According to Publishers Weekly, Leopold was "one of the few reporters who'd actually interviewed Enron President Jeff Skilling" following Enron's bankruptcy in December 2001.

Leopold began his career in 1992, writing obituaries for The Reporter Dispatch newspaper in White Plains, New York. He became the crime and courts reporter for the Whittier Daily News in 1997 and then moved to the City News Service where he covered court trials. Leopold next worked as a city editor and reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He then worked for Dow Jones Newswires as its Los Angeles bureau chief. According to a Washington Post report, the press release for Leopold's book Off the Record (published later as News Junkie) stated that "He says he was fired by the Los Angeles Times 'for threatening to rip a reporter's head off'". Leopold says he quit Dow Jones Newswires in a dispute over his beat, but later learned the news service was planning to fire him because of a correction to one of his Enron stories: "Seems I got all of the facts wrong". Leopold was later the US correspondent for 95bFM in Auckland, New Zealand.

Jason Arthur Leopold (born October 7, 1969) is an American senior investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News. He was previously an investigative reporter for Al Jazeera America and Vice News. He worked at Truthout as a senior editor and reporter, a position he left after three years on February 19, 2008, to co-found the web-based political magazine The Public Record, Leopold's profile page on The Public Record now says he is Editor-at-Large. Leopold returned to Truthout as Deputy Managing Editor in October 2009 and was made lead investigative reporter in 2012 before leaving Truthout in May 2013. He makes extensive use of the Freedom of Information Act to research stories.