Murray Waas

Trump and his political supporters argued that Trump would not face any serious legal jeopardy, as a result of Comey's allegations, because whatever what was said or transpired between Trump and Comey was based solely on the word of the President of the United States against the FBI Director he had only recently fired: “We have to keep in mind that is one person’s record of what happened,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said on Fox News in one typical comment repeated by Trump White House surrogates. “The only two people who know what happened in these meetings are the president and James Comey.”"

Based on the disclosures in the Vox and The New York Times reports, Senate Majority Leader, Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, requested that the Justice Department's Inspector General investigate Whitaker's conduct. Schumer wanted the Inspector General to investigate allegations "by veteran journalist Murray Waas [in Vox, which] revealed that Whitaker, while he was serving as chief of staff to [then-Attorney General Jeff] Sessions, was counseling the White House on how the president might pressure Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to direct the Justice Department to investigate Trump’s enemies." Schumer also asked the Justice Department to investigate whether, Whitaker, while Acting Attorney General "may have shared with the White House... confidential grand jury or investigative information from the Special Counsel investigation."

In 2019, Waas broke numerous exclusive stories for Vox and The New York Review of Books about the impeachment investigation of President Trump. As explained by Waas in Vox, "At the core of the impeachment inquiry is a substantial body of evidence that President Trump, both personally and through subordinates, pushed Ukraine to investigate former Vice President’s Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and his business dealings in Ukraine. This pressure campaign stood to materially benefit Trump’s 2020 presidential reelection effort by manufacturing dirt against a key rival. It is alleged that Trump withheld $390 million in congressionally-approved military assistance to Ukraine for months pending Zelensky’s public agreement to open an investigation."

Waas also was one of the first reporters to disclose how President Trump attempted to exploit the U.S. Department of Justice to improperly investigate his perceived political enemies. On November 9, 2018, Waas reported in Vox that then-Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker "privately provided advice to the president last year on how the White House might be able to pressure the Justice Department to investigate the president’s political adversaries"—more specifically, also disclosing for the first time, that Whitaker had "counseled the president in private on how the White House might be able to pressure the Justice Department to name a special counsel to investigate... Hillary Clinton.""

Waas broke the first story disclosing that former FBI Director James Comey had corroboratory witnesses when it came to Comey's allegations that President Trump ordered him to shut down an FBI investigation into whether his then National Security Advisor Micheal Flynn had lied to the FBI about his conversations with a Russian diplomat, while the two men were completely alone in the Oval Office on February 14, 2017. Special Counsel Mueller investigated Comey's allegations as a potential obstruction of justice.

But in a June 7, 2017 report in Vox, Waas disclosed that Comey contemporaneously spoke at length with three of his top aides about the president ordering him to shut down the FBI investigation of Flynn. Waas wrote: "Those three officials, according to two people with detailed, firsthand knowledge of the matter, were Jim Rybicki, Comey’s chief of staff and senior counselor; James Baker, the FBI’s general counsel; and Andrew McCabe, then the bureau’s deputy director, and now the acting director." Comey himself confirmed that this was case when he testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee the following day, in response to questions prompted by the Waas story.

While writing about the second Bush administration's policies that led up to war with Iraq, Waas simultaneously reported about the investigation of CIA leak prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation as to who leaked covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the press—illustrating in his reporting how the two stories were inextricably linked in that the effort to damage Plame was part of a broader Bush White House effort to discredit those who were alleging that it had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war.

Regarding these same stories on the Plame case, as well as his earlier stories on the misrepresentation of intelligence information by the Bush administration to take the U.S. to war with Iraq, New York University journalism professor and press critic Jay Rosen wrote that Waas had the promise to be his generation's ""new Bob Woodward": "Today the biggest story in town is what really went down as the Bush team drove deceptively to war, and later tried to conceal how bad the deception—and decision-making—had been." Waas, Rosen wrote, had been doing "what Woodward has a reputation for doing: finding, tracking, breaking it into reportable parts.

The reaction to the Waas stories on Romney, especially the one about denying birth certificates to the children of same sex parents was swift. Outraged civil rights and LGBT groups condemning Romney—in the days just prior to the election. Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay-rights advocacy organization, for example, said: "Mitt Romney has stood before the American people multiple times and said he does not support discrimination against LGBT people – and that is an outright lie.’’ Griffin further commented that by "denying birth certificates to children [of same sex parents]... Romney has undertaken to disenfranchise LGBT people.’’

Murray Waas's reporting on the administration of George W. Bush—especially with regard to the Bush administration's misrepresentation of intelligence to take the nation to war, and the Plame affair—has been called "groundbreaking" by New York University journalism Professor Jay Rosen, who considers Waas the "new Bob Woodward": "By Woodward Now," Rosen writes of Waas: "I mean the reporter who is actually doing what Woodward has a reputation for doing: finding, tracking, breaking into reportable parts—and then publishing—the biggest story in town. The Biggest Story in Town (almost a term of art in political Washington) is the one that would cause the biggest earthquake if the facts sealed inside it started coming out now. Today the biggest story in town is what really went down as the Bush team drove deceptively to war, and later tried to conceal how bad the deception—and decision-making—had been."

During the final days of the 2012 presidential campaign, Waas wrote a series of articles for the Boston Globe detailing how Mitt Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, had implemented policies to restrict the rights of the state's LGBT community, as a way to curry favor with conservative and evangelical voters who vote in large numbers in the Republican presidential primaries. Among those policies, Waas wrote, Romney refused to grant birth certificates to the children of same sex parents. Confidential state records obtained by Waas showed that a senior Department of Public Health lawyer warned the Romney administration that the failure to provide birth certificates to these children would constitute “'violations of existing statutes,' impair law enforcement and security efforts in a post 9/11 world, and would cause the children to encounter difficulties later in life as they tried to register for school, obtain a driver's license or a passport, enlist in the military, or even vote."

On the eve of the historic health reform vote in Congress, on March 17, 2010, Reuters published a story by Waas, detailing how one of the nation's largest insurance companies, Assurant, had a "company policy of targeting policyholders with HIV" for cancelation of their policies once they were diagnosed. The story asserted: "A computer program and algorithm targeted every policyholder recently diagnosed with HIV for an automatic fraud investigation, as the company searched for any pretext to revoke their policy ... [T]heir insurance policies often were canceled on erroneous information, the flimsiest of evidence, or for no good reason at all."

After passage of the health reform bill, Reuters followed up, with another story by Waas on April 23, 2010, disclosing that WellPoint, the nation's largest health insurance company, had similarly targeted policyholders with breast cancer, shortly after their diagnoses. The Reuters story asserted that WellPoint utilized "a computer algorithm that automatically targeted ... every other policyholder recently diagnosed with breast cancer. The software triggered an immediate fraud investigation, as the company searched for some pretext to drop their policies."

On April 23, 2010, Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius wrote Wellpoint's CEO, Angela Braly, to say that Wellpoint's actions were "deplorable" and "unconscionable," and called on the company to "immediately cease these practices." Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi weighed in as well after reading the story, saying: "Americans who are fighting for their lives should not have to fight for their health insurance."

President Obama, whose late mother had problems and disagreements with her own insurance carrier before she died from ovarian cancer, followed up on May 8, 2010, by severely criticizing WellPoint for the practice in his weekly radio address.

Praising the reform, The New York Times editorial page said in a May 2, 2010 editorial:

Although he initially shied away from writing about health care because of his history as a cancer survivor, in 2009 and 2010, Waas weighed in with a series of articles for Reuters, detailing how many of the nation's largest health insurance companies, improperly, and even illegally, canceled the policies of tens of thousands of customers shortly after they were diagnosed with HIV, cancer, and other life-threatening but costly diseases. One story disclosed that the health insurer, WellPoint, using a computer algorithm, identified women recently diagnosed with breast cancer and then singled them out for cancellation of their policies. The story not only caused considerable public outrage, but led Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, and President Barack Obama, to call on WellPoint to end the practice.

Waas also comments on contemporary American political controversies in his personal blogs Whatever Already! and at The Huffington Post. An "instant book", the United States v. I. Lewis Libby which he edited, with research assistance by Jeff Lomonaco, was published by Union Square Press (an imprint of Sterling Publishing) in June 2007.

Several of Waas's later published accounts of that aspect of the Plame affair informed his Union Square Press book on the Libby trial published in June 2007, which he discusses in some detail in his interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!.

The United States v. I. Lewis Libby, edited and with reporting by Waas, was published by Sterling Publishing's Union Square Press imprint on June 5, 2007.

Reviewing the book in the Columbia Journalism Review, James Boylan, a contributing editor of the magazine, wrote for its November/December 2007 issue:

In July 2007, GQ Magazine named Waas as one of four of "The Best Reporters You Don't Know About," writing about him: "Years of groundbreaking watchdog journalism have resulted in this nickname: the new Bob Woodward. His pieces on the Plame leaks and U.S. attorney firings inadvertently provided candidates with more ammunition against the current administration than any campaign strategist could hope for."

In 1987, when Waas was only twenty-six years old, he learned that he had a life-threatening "advanced form" of cancer. On June 26, 2006, Washington Post media writer Howard Kurtz disclosed that Waas had been told that he had an "incurable Stage C" cancer and faced a "terminal diagnosis."

Summarizing the stories that Waas wrote for National Journal during 2005 and 2006 about the second Bush administration's policies that led up to war with Iraq, The Washington Post online White House columnist Dan Froomkin, wrote on March 31, 2006:

That same story also disclosed that Libby was encouraging Miller to stay in jail and not reveal that Libby was her source. A short time later, citing the Waas story, prosecutor Fitzgerald wrote Libby's attorney, alleging that "Libby had simply decided that encouraging Ms. Miller to testify was not in his best interest" and that Libby discouraging Miller to testify might be an illegal effort to obstruct his investigation. Libby then wrote and called Miller saying that it was alright for her to testify. After spending more than a hundred days in jail, Miller was released, whereupon she provided testimony and evidence to prosecutors against Libby, directly leading to Libby's indictment, and subsequent conviction, on multiple federal criminal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz wrote on April 17, 2006, that Waas' account "set in motion the waiver springing Miller from jail on contempt charges."

In a rare interview about his work, on May 15, 2006, with Elizabeth Halloran, of U.S. News and World Report, when she asked whether he was "working on stories other than those involving the Fitzgerald investigation," Waas indicated that he has "been working on a long, explanatory piece about healthcare issues, the cervical cancer vaccine." Among the questions that he raised with Halloran are: "Why isn't that vaccine going to get to the people it should get to? Is it going to be locked away?"

In the summer of 2006, writing in Nieman Reports, Jim Boyd, former deputy editorial page editor of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune for twenty-four years, prepared an "exclusive list" of newspaper reporters whom he considered "courageous," including among them Murray Waas: "People I consider courageous are Murray Waas at the National Journal; Dan Froomkin at washingtonpost.com and niemanwatchdog.org; Warren Strobel and several of his colleagues at the Knight Ridder Washington bureau (soon to be the McClatchy Washington bureau); Walter Pincus and Dana Priest of the [Washington] Post. And, of course, Helen Thomas."

On August 6, 2005, Waas disclosed for the first time that it was Libby who had provided Plame's name to Miller, writing: "I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has told federal investigators that he met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller on July 8, 2003, and discussed CIA operative Valerie Plame, according to legal sources familiar with Libby's account.

Murray S. Waas is an American Independent investigative journalist known most recently for his coverage of the White House planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and ensuing controversies and American political scandals such as the Plame affair (also known as the "CIA leak grand jury investigation", the "CIA leak scandal", and "Plamegate"). For much of his career, Waas focused on national security reporting, but has also written about social issues and corporate malfeasance. His articles about the second Iraq war and Plame affair matters have appeared in National Journal, where he has worked as a staff correspondent and contributing editor, The Atlantic, and, earlier The American Prospect.

In June 1998, J.D. Lasica published "The Web: A New Channel for Investigative Journalism", a "sidebar" to his article entitled "Salon: The Best Pure-Play Web Publication?", published in American Journalism Review, assessing reporting on the Impeachment of Bill Clinton in Salon.com by Waas and his colleagues, observing that "Salon's coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky matter—its first sustained foray into classic investigative journalism—has served as a counterweight to the mainstream media's wolfpack mindset" and citing the view of Andrew Ross (then-managing editor of Salon); according to Lasica, "Salon's investigative journalism ... has raised old media's hackles because, Ross says, it was done the old-fashioned way: shoe leather, cultivating sources, working the phones—no new-media tricks here." Indeed, Lasica continues the 1998 account, by pointing out that Waas, who has written a dozen stories for Salon, is [at that time] a bit of a technophobe; he never signs onto the Web and has never seen his stories online. He writes for Salon, he says, because 'I like the daily rhythm and the immediacy.'" Waas was the winner in 1998 of the Society of Professional Journalists Award for Depth Reporting for his coverage of Whitewater and the impeachment crisis.

As part of his work for the Alicia Patterson Foundation, Waas published a 7,912 word article in the Los Angeles Times on April 3, 1994, detailing how mentally retarded children institutionalized by the District of Columbia government had died because of abuse and neglect. The story led to renewed scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Justice of the city's treatment of its mentally retarded wards and spurred on the settlement of a civil suit brought against the city government by the parents of children who had died due to abuse or neglect.

Following the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, in 1993, while a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Waas, along with his Los Angeles Times colleague Douglas Frantz, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of national reporting for his stories detailing that administration's prewar foreign policy towards the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. That same year, Waas was also a recipient of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded by the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on The Press, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University, for "a series that detailed United States policy toward Iraq before the Persian Gulf war".

Subsequently, Waas successfully sued the George Washington University Medical Center, which had negligently "failed to diagnose his cancer, winning a $650,000 judgment ... in a 1992 verdict ... upheld by the D.C. Court of Appeals." Although, according to a pathologist hired by Waas to testify in the case, "90% of [such] patients die within two years," Waas survived and was later declared "cancer-free." His recovery and survival were later described as a "miracle" by the physicians treating him.

Waas won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 1992 to research and write about the rights of the institutionalized and incarcerated in the U.S. For his fellowship, he investigated substandard conditions and questionable deaths at institutions for the mentally retarded, mental hospitals, nursing homes, juvenile detention centers, and jails and prisons.

As part of that reporting, on March 10, 1992, Waas and Frantz disclosed that the Reagan and Bush administrations had engaged in secret intelligence sharing with Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, after falsely telling Congress and the congressional intelligence committees that it had ended all such cooperation. The two reporters wrote: "The Bush Administration shared intelligence information with the regime of Saddam Hussein until at least May, 1990, three months before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, according to formerly classified documents ... even though Congress had been told Congress that such cooperation ended in 1988 when the war between Iraq and Iran ended."

Also as part of that same series, the two reporters disclosed on April 18, 1992, that "The Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations secretly allowed Saudi Arabia to provide American-made weapons to the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and other nations over a period of almost 10 years in covert operations designed to sidestep legal restrictions imposed by Congress, according to classified documents."

Regarding the significance of these various disclosures, The New York Times, columnist Anthony Lewis wrote on June 18, 1992:

On October 27, 1992, the late David Shaw, then a staff writer for the Los Angeles Times who won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism the previous year, assessed the reporting by his colleagues Murray Waas and Douglas Frantz on the first Bush administration's prewar policy towards Iraq leading up to the first Gulf War, which included "more than 100 stories, totaling more than 90,000 words": "The Times's stories—many based on previously secret papers prepared by the Bush administration—alleged that the Bush administration tried to cover up what it had done by altering documents it supplied to Congress and by attempting to obstruct official investigations of aid to Iraq," quoting the observation of Leonard Downie, executive editor of The Washington Post, that his own newspaper was "slow in getting up to speed on that story, in part because it's the kind of story involving careful work with documents ... Once you're behind, it takes a while to catch up." Downie credits the Los Angeles Times with "pav[ing] the way," saying that that is "why we began pursuing it after really not noticing it from the outset."