Quest by 'rageful guy' to pry out US government secrets

Los Angeles

WHEN reporter Jason Leopold, 45, gets ready to take on the United States government, he psychs himself up by listening to heavy metal bands Slayer and Pantera.

Mr Leopold, who describes himself as "a pretty rageful guy", works for Vice News and reserves most of his aggression for dealing with the government. He has revealed about 20,000 pages of US government documents, many of them the basis for explosive news stories.

Despite his appearance - on a recent day his T-shirt read "Sick of It All" - his secret weapon is the opposite of anarchic: an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the labyrinthine administration machine that serves it and the kind of legal judo often required to pry information from it.

His small office in his home here is littered with envelopes from various branches of the government and computer disks filled with secrets. His persistence has led to numerous revelations - some in documents released exclusively to him and others in documents that were released to multiple reporters after pressure had been brought by Mr Leopold.

They included details of a second, unreleased, CIA report on torture (the first was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in December), a series of disclosures from Guantanamo Bay and racist e-mails from the Ferguson, Missouri, Police Department released after the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer and the subsequent racial unrest in the city.

"Every time I have a FOIA I think nobody has come across, he seems to already have a piece of it," said Adam Goldman, who reports on terrorism and national security for The Washington Post.

Since the Obama administration oversaw a crackdown on government employees talking to journalists, the Freedom of Information Act has gained new importance as a source of information. But critics accuse the government of making the process difficult - Mr Leopold must often sue to get documents. Its role, as a fraught but increasingly mainstream means of maintaining government transparency, has been the subject of congressional hearings which have aired the experiences of journalists and others, including Mr Leopold, who testified at one this summer.

A number of stories over the last several years based on government documents leaked by WikiLeaks and by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden seem to have piqued the interest of the public, and of journalists, in acquiring such materials, Mr Leopold said.

In 2009, according to its own figures, the government received about 560,000 Freedom of Information Act requests. By 2014, that number had risen to about 715,000.

And nobody seems to do it as well as Mr Leopold. In an era of ideologically driven news, he said, publishing government documents is perhaps the most neutral form of reporting.

"I would love to have somebody drop a million pages of documents on me," he said, referring to leaks. "But even if that does happen, it's not going to happen every day, every week, right? So I have to figure out how to do this work."

Mr Leopold has studied the law in its entirety, about two dozen pages, and follows each legal and administrative development that affects it. His submissions requesting information are so detailed that they sometimes run to 10 pages, he said.

He has thousands of requests outstanding, he said. Every day he comes home and checks his mailbox. When he sees the envelopes, and thinks they may contain documents he wants, he rips them open like Christmas presents. The rush of adrenaline, he said, can be compared to a cocaine high. He would know. He has written, in a book entitled News Junkie, of his addiction to the drug and his felony plea for stealing CDs to feed a US$300-a-day habit.

A decade ago, after a series of scandals, including accusations of plagiarism and improper sourcing (which Mr Leopold disputes) and troubled stints at Dow Jones and The Los Angeles Times, he found himself an outsider, trying to break news on smaller websites from his house. Until he joined Vice News in 2014, he used a credit card to pay thousands of dollars required for lawsuits, an essential part of forcing documents out of government archives and into public view.

"I love the score," he said. "So maybe there's this drug-ish thing in me that still exists . . . I love the score! Particularly when it is from the government! I just got you to give me your own documents, you know!" NYT