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 became 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. He became a vocal critic of the Iraq War and has maintained a critical position on American foreign policy.
Greenwald started contributing to Salon in 2007, and to The Guardian in 2012. In June 2013, while at The Guardian, he began publishing a series of reports detailing previously unknown information about American and British global surveillance programs based on classified documents provided by Edward Snowden. His work contributed to The Guardians 2014 Pulitzer Prize win and he was among a group of three reporters who won the 2013 George Polk Award. In 2014, he cofounded The Intercept, of which he was an editor until he resigned in October 2020. Greenwald subsequently started publishing his own newsletter.
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 against Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the lead up to the 2018 elections. Greenwald was charged with cybercrimes by Brazilian prosecutors over the leaks in January 2020, though the charges were dismissed by a federal judge a month later. He now hosts the show System Update on Rumble.
Early life and education Greenwald was born in Queens, New York City, to Arlene and Daniel Greenwald. Greenwald's family moved to Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, when he was an infant; his parents separated when he was six. 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". Greenwald attended Nova Middle School and Nova High School in Davie, Florida.
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. His experiences on his college debate team influenced his career path. "That developed, I think, a lot of the skills and interest that ended up guiding my future career," he said in an interview.
Litigation attorney 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. He worked pro bono much of the time, and his cases included representing white supremacist Matthew Hale in Illinois, who, Greenwald believed, was wrongly imprisoned, 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".
Later, according to Greenwald, "I decided voluntarily to wind down my practice in 2005 because I could, and because, after ten years, I was bored with litigating full-time and wanted to do other things which I thought were more engaging and could make more of an impact, including political writing."
Journalism Unclaimed Territory and Salon In October 2005, he began his blog Unclaimed Territory, focusing on the investigation pertaining to the Plame affair, the CIA leak grand jury investigation, the federal indictment of Scooter Libby, and the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy. In April 2006, the blog received the 2005 Koufax Award for "Best New Blog". According to Sean Wilentz in the New Statesman, Greenwald "seemed to take pride in attacking Republicans and Democrats alike".
In February 2007, Greenwald became a contributing writer for the Salon website, and the new column and blog superseded Unclaimed Territory, although Salon featured hyperlinks to it in Greenwald's dedicated biographical section.
Among the frequent topics of his Salon articles were the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks and the candidacy of former CIA official John O. Brennan for the jobs of either Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (D/CIA) or the next Director of National Intelligence (DNI) after the election of Barack Obama. Brennan withdrew his name from consideration for the post after opposition centered in liberal blogs and led by Greenwald.
In a 2010 article for Salon, Greenwald described U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning as "a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives" and "a national hero similar to Daniel Ellsberg". In an article for The Raw Story published in 2011, Greenwald criticized the prison conditions in which Manning was held after her arrest by military authorities.
Greenwald was described by Rachel Maddow during his period writing for Salon as "the American left's most fearless political commentator."
The Guardian In July 2012, Greenwald joined the American wing of the British newspaper The Guardian, contributing a weekly column and a daily blog. 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.
Global surveillance disclosure
Greenwald was initially contacted anonymously in late 2012 by Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the U.S. National Security Agency, who said he held "sensitive documents" that he wished to share. Greenwald found the measures that Snowden asked him to take to secure their communications too annoying to employ. Snowden then contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras about a month later in January 2013.
According to The Guardian, Snowden was attracted to Greenwald and Poitras by a Salon article written by Greenwald detailing how Poitras' films had made her a "target of the government". Greenwald began working with Snowden in either February or in April, after Poitras asked Greenwald to meet her in New York City, at which point Snowden began providing documents to them both.
As part of the global surveillance disclosure, the first of Snowden's documents were published on June 5, 2013, in The Guardian in an article by Greenwald reporting on the top-secret United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order requiring Verizon to provide the National Security Agency with telephone metadata for all calls between the U.S. and abroad, as well as all domestic calls. Greenwald said that Snowden's documents exposed the "scale of domestic surveillance under Obama". In September 2021, Yahoo! News reported that in 2017, after the publication of the Vault 7 files, "top intelligence officials lobbied the White House" to designate Glenn Greenwald as an "information broker" to allow for more investigative tools against him, "potentially paving the way" for his prosecution. However, the White House rejected this idea. "I am not the least bit surprised," Greenwald told Yahoo! News, "that the CIA, a longtime authoritarian and antidemocratic institution, plotted to find a way to criminalize journalism and spy on and commit other acts of aggression against journalists."
The series on which Greenwald worked contributed to The Guardian (alongside The Washington Post) winning the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2014.
Greenwald's work on the Snowden story was featured in the documentary Citizenfour, which won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. Greenwald appeared on stage with director Laura Poitras and Snowden's girlfriend, Lindsay Mills, to accept the award. In the 2016 feature film Snowden, directed by Oliver Stone, Greenwald was played by actor Zachary Quinto.
Testimony In a statement delivered before the Brazilian National Congress in early August 2013, Greenwald testified that the U.S. government had used counterterrorism as a pretext for clandestine surveillance to compete with other countries in the "business, industrial and economic fields".
On December 18, 2013, Greenwald told the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs of the European Parliament that "most governments around the world are not only turning their backs on Edward Snowden but also on their ethical responsibilities". Speaking via a video link, Greenwald said: "It is the UK through their interception of underwater fibre optic cables, that is a primary threat to the privacy of European citizens when it comes to their telephone and emails". In a statement given to the European Parliament, Greenwald said:
On October 15, 2013, Greenwald left The Guardian to pursue a "once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline".
First Look Media and The Intercept Financial backing for The Intercept was provided by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Omidyar told media critic Jay Rosen that the decision was fueled by his "rising concern about press freedoms in the United States and around the world". Greenwald, along with his colleagues Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, initially were working on creating a platform online to support independent journalism, when they were approached by Omidyar, who was hoping to establish his own media organization. That news organization, First Look Media, launched its first online publication, The Intercept, on February 10, 2014. Greenwald initially served as editor, alongside Poitras and Scahill. The organization is incorporated as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable entity.
The Intercept was in contact during the 2016 presidential campaign with Guccifer 2.0, who relayed some of the material about Hillary Clinton, gathered via a data breach, to Greenwald. The Grugq, a counterintelligence specialist, reported in October 2016: "The Intercept was both aware that the e-mails were from Guccifer 2.0, that Guccifer 2.0 has been attributed to Russian intelligence services, and that there is significant public evidence supporting this attribution."
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 self-publishing his work, 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.
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