Glenn Greenwald

American journalist, lawyer and writer (born 1967)

Glenn Edward Greenwald (born March 6, 1967) is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer. In 1996, Greenwald founded a law firm concentrating on First Amendment litigation. He began blogging on national security issues in October 2005, when he was becoming increasingly concerned with what he viewed as attacks on civil liberties by the George W. Bush administration in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Through The Intercept Brasil in June 2019, Greenwald published leaked conversations between senior officials involved in Operation Car Wash, a corruption case in Brazil. The conversations appeared to show the investigative judge acting prejudicially towards Lula in the lead up to the 2018 elections. Greenwald was charged with cybercrimes by Brazilian prosecutors over the leaks in January 2020, Greenwald is Jewish, but grew up without practicing an organized religion, did not have a bar mitzvah, and has said his "moral precepts aren't informed in any way by religious doctrine". Inspired by his grandfather's time on the then Lauderdale Lakes City Council, Greenwald, still in high school, decided to run at the age of 17 for an at large seat on the council in the 1985 elections. He was unsuccessful, coming in fourth place with 7% of the total vote. In 1991, Greenwald ran again, coming in third place with 18% of the vote. After that, he stopped running for political office and instead focused on law school. He received a B. A. in philosophy from George Washington University in 1990 and a J. D. from New York University School of Law in 1994. "That developed, I think, a lot of the skills and interest that ended up guiding my future career," he said in an interview.

Greenwald practiced law in the litigation department at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz from 1994 to 1995. In 1996, he co founded his own litigation firm, Greenwald Christoph & Holland (later renamed Greenwald Christoph PC), where he litigated cases concerning issues of U. S. constitutional law and civil rights. and the neo nazi National Alliance. About his work in First Amendment speech cases, Greenwald told Rolling Stone magazine in 2013, "to me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it not when it's easy not when it supports your position, not when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you hate". Greenwald wrote on Salon that the move offered him "the opportunity to reach a new audience, to further internationalize my readership, and to be re invigorated by a different environment" as reasons for the move.

Greenwald was initially contacted anonymously in late 2012 by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U. S. National Security Agency,

The series on which Greenwald worked contributed to The Guardian (alongside The Washington Post) winning the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014. By 2019, he was serving as an Intercept columnist without any control over the site's news reporting. On October 29, 2020, Greenwald resigned from The Intercept, giving his reasons as political censorship and contractual breaches by the editors, who he said had prevented him from reporting on allegations concerning Joe Biden's conduct with regard to China and Ukraine and had demanded that he not publish the article in any other publication. Betsy Reed, the editor in chief, disputed Greenwald's accusations and claims of censorship, and accused him of presenting dubious claims by the Trump campaign as journalism. Greenwald said he would begin publishing his work on Substack, and had begun "exploring the possibility of creating a new media outlet." After resigning from The Intercept, Greenwald published his article about Biden and his correspondence with the editors of The Intercept on his Substack page. In 2023, Greenwald announced that he would begin hosting System Update, a nightly, one hour live program on Rumble, an alternative to video hosting platform YouTube. System Update consists of a monologue concerning topical political issues, often related to media criticism and developments within the American security state, as well as interviews with guests. Such guests have included academics, political figures, and journalists Jeffrey Sachs, John Mearsheimer, Edward Snowden, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Lee Fang, and Matt Taibbi, among others. After moving to Rumble, Greenwald republished his Substack work to Locals, Rumble's Substack alternative.

According to Simon van Zuylen Wood writing for New York magazine in early 2018, Greenwald has "repositioned himself as a bomb throwing media critic" since the Snowden revelations. particularly on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

On June 9, 2019, Greenwald and journalists from investigative journalism magazine The Intercept Brasil where he was an editor, released several messages exchanged via Telegram between members of the investigation team of Operation Car Wash – called Car Leaks. The messages implicated members of Brazil's judiciary system and of the Operação Lava Jato taskforce, including former judge and Minister of Justice Sérgio Moro, and lead prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol, in the violation of legal and ethical procedures during the investigation, trial and arrest of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, with the alleged objective of preventing him from running for a third term in the 2018 Brazilian general election, among other crimes. The FBI was also involved. Following the leak, Folha de São Paulo and Veja confirmed the authenticity of the messages and worked in partnership with The Intercept Brasil to sort the remaining material in their possession before releasing it. On July 23, Brazilian Federal Police announced that they had arrested and were investigating Araraquara hacker Walter Delgatti Neto for breaking into the authorities' Telegram accounts. Neto confessed to the hack and to having given copies of the chat logs to Greenwald. Police said the attack had been accomplished by abusing Telegram's phone number verification and exploiting vulnerabilities in voicemail technology in use in Brazil by using a spoofed phone number. The Intercept neither confirmed nor denied Neto being their source, citing freedom of the press provisions of the 1988 Brazilian Constitution. Greenwald faced death threats and homophobic harassment from Bolsonaro supporters due to his reporting on the Telegram messages. A New York Times profile by Ernesto Londoño about Greenwald and his husband David Miranda, a left wing congressman, described how the couple became targets of homophobia from Bolsonaro supporters as a result of the reporting. and AP called Greenwald's reporting "the first test case for a free press" under Bolsonaro. In reporting on retaliation against Greenwald from the Bolsonaro government and its supporters, The Guardian said the articles published by Greenwald and The Intercept "have had an explosive impact on Brazilian politics and dominated headlines for weeks", adding that the exposés "appeared to show prosecutors in the sweeping Operation Car Wash corruption inquiry colluding with Sérgio Moro, the judge who became a hero in Brazil for jailing powerful businessmen, middlemen and politicians." On August 9, after President Bolsonaro threatened to imprison Greenwald for this reporting, Supreme Court justice Gilmar Mendes ruled that any investigation of Greenwald in connection with the reporting would be illegal under the Brazilian constitution, citing press freedom as a "pillar of democracy". In November 2019, Brazilian journalist Augusto Nunes physically attacked Greenwald during a joint appearance on a Brazilian radio program. Immediately prior to the attack, Nunes had argued that a family judge ought to take away Greenwald's adopted children, prompting Greenwald to call him a coward. Two of Jair Bolsonaro's sons praised Nunes' actions, while former presidential candidate Ciro Gomes defended Greenwald. In January 2020, Greenwald was charged by Brazilian prosecutors with cybercrimes, in a move that Trevor Timm in The Guardian described as retaliation for his reporting. The Canary website described the charges as "ominously similar to the indictment of Julian Assange" and quoted Max Blumenthal and Jen Robinson as remarking on the similarity of the two sets of charges. Greenwald received support from The New York Times which published an editorial stating "Mr. Greenwald's articles did what a free press is supposed to do: They revealed a painful truth about those in power". The Freedom of the Press Foundation made a statement asking the Brazilian government to "halt its persecution of Greenwald". In February 2020, a federal judge dismissed the charges against Greenwald, citing a ruling from Supreme Court justice Gilmar Mendes that shielded him.

In his 2006 book How Would a Patriot Act?, Greenwald wrote that he was politically apathetic at the time of the Iraq War and accepted the George W. Bush administration's judgement that "American security really would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country." Greenwald is critical of actions jointly supported by Democrats and Republicans, writing in 2010: "The worst and most tyrannical government actions in Washington are equally supported on a fully bipartisan basis." Tamsin Shaw wrote in The New York Review of Books in September 2018: "Greenwald has repeatedly, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, decried as Russophobia the findings that Putin ordered interference in the 2016 US presidential election". Greenwald remained doubtful of assertions that the Trump presidential campaign worked with the Russians after the release of the letter about the Mueller's findings from attorney general William Barr in late March 2019. He called the investigation "a scam and a fraud from the beginning" in an appearance on Democracy Now!. Greenwald told Tucker Carlson on Fox News: "Let me just say, [MSNBC] should have their top host on primetime go before the cameras and hang their head in shame and apologize for lying to people for three straight years, exploiting their fears to great profit". He said he is formally banned from appearing on MSNBC, citing confirmations from two unnamed producers for the network, for his criticisms of its coverage of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. MSNBC stated it has not barred Greenwald from appearing on its programs. After the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, on April 22 he wrote that the press continued to report that Trump's campaign conspired with Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign. In January 2020, Greenwald described the various assertions regarding Russian influence on American politics as "At the very best, wildly exaggerated hysteria and the kind of jingoistic fear mongering that's plagued U. S. Politics since the end of WWII".

Greenwald has criticized the Israeli government, including its foreign policy, claimed influence on U. S. politics and the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. In May 2016, Greenwald accused The New York Times of "abject cowardice" in its use of quotation marks for the occupation of Gaza and alleged "journalistic malfeasance" in the incident "out of fear of the negative reaction by influential factions". After Greenwald's criticism, the New York Times removed the quotation marks in the article he had criticised. Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic in January 2012 said Greenwald "evinces toward Israel a disdain that is quite breathtaking. He holds Israel to a standard he doesn't hold any other country, except the U. S." Liel Leibovitz in Tablet magazine in 2013 considered it "largely inaccurate" to match Greenwald's "obsessive focus on Israel's supposed role in evil global conspiracies to simple anti Semitism. Instead, the ideology that drives [his] tendency to see the NSA and Israel as two heads of the same Satanic beast is more complex and ideologically driven—an attack on the doctrines of exceptionalism that fueled the rise of both America and Israel." Following the Charlie Hebdo murders in January 2015, David Bernstein in The Washington Post wrote Greenwald (in an Intercept article) "certainly appears to believe that Der Sturmer like anti Semitic cartoons are the moral and logical equivalent of making fun of Moses or Muhammed." In an exchange with Greenwald in February 2019, Rep. Ilhan Omar, D Minn., tweeted, "It's all about the Benjamins baby", suggesting that money rather than principle motivated US politicians' support for Israel, including payments from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to US politicians. Many Democrats and Republicans, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, condemned the tweet, arguing it perpetuated an antisemitic stereotype of Jewish money and influence fueling American politicians' support of Israel. Greenwald defended Omar: "we're not allowed to talk about an equally potent well organized and well financed lobby that ensures a bipartisan consensus in support of U. S. defense of Israel, that the minute that you mention that lobby, you get attacked as being anti Semitic."

In a November 2018 Guardian article, Luke Harding and Dan Collyns cited anonymous sources which stated that Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret meetings with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2013, 2015, and 2016. Greenwald said that if Manafort had entered the Ecuadorian consulate, there would be evidence from the surrounding cameras. Greenwald, a former contributor to The Guardian, stated that the paper "has such a pervasive and unprofessionally personal hatred for Julian Assange that it has frequently dispensed with all journalistic standards in order to malign him." Greenwald criticized the government's decision to charge Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917 for his role in the 2010 publication of the Iraq War documents leak. Greenwald wrote in The Washington Post: "The Trump administration has undoubtedly calculated that Assange's uniquely unpopular status across the political spectrum [in the United States] makes him the ideal test case for creating a precedent that criminalizes the defining attributes of investigative journalism."

In October 2018, Greenwald said that Bolsonaro was "often depicted wrongly in the Western media as being Brazil's Trump, and he's actually much closer to say Filipino President Duterte or even the Egyptian dictator General el Sisi in terms of what he believes and what he's probably capable of carrying out." Greenwald said that Bolsonaro could be a "good partner" for President Trump "If you think that the U. S. should go back to kind of the Monroe Doctrine as [National Security Adviser] John Bolton talked openly about, and ruling Latin America, and U. S. interests". Greenwald has faced death threats and homophobic harassment from Bolsonaro supporters due to his reporting on leaked Telegram messages about Brazil's Operation Car Wash and Bolsonaro's justice minister Sérgio Moro. In January 2020, Brazilian federal prosecutors charged Greenwald with cybercrimes, alleging he was part of a "criminal organization" that hacked into the cellphones of prosecutors and other public officials in 2019. Prosecutors said he played a "clear role in facilitating the commission of a crime" by, for example, encouraging hackers to delete archives to cover their tracks. Greenwald, who was not detained, called the charges "an obvious attempt to attack a free press in retaliation for the revelations we reported about Minister of Justice Sérgio Moro and the Bolsonaro government." In February 2020, a federal judge dismissed the charges against Greenwald, citing a ruling from Supreme Court justice Gilmar Mendes that shielded him.

In 2005, Greenwald criticized illegal immigration, saying that it would result in a "parade of evils" and arguing that large numbers of illegal immigrants could not be assimilated and would "wreak havoc". He subsequently disavowed that belief.

Greenwald is a vegan and an advocate for animal rights. He and his husband Miranda once owned 24 rescue dogs. In 2022, the Security Service of Ukraine placed Greenwald on a list of public figures who it alleges promote Russian propaganda.

Greenwald has been placed on numerous "top 50" and "top 25" lists of columnists in the United States.