When reporter Jason Leopold gets ready to take on the U.S. government, he psychs himself up by listening to the heavy metal bands Slayer and Pantera.
He describes himself as “a pretty rageful guy.” Mr. Leopold (45), who works for Vice News, reserves most of his aggression for dealing with the government. He has revealed about 20,000 pages of 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, the labyrinthine administration machine that serves it and the kind of legal judo often required to pry information from it.
His small office, just off the kitchen 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.
CIA memos on torture They have included some details of unreleased CIA memos on torture (another report 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.
Since the Obama administration has overseen a crackdown on government employees talking to journalists, the Freedom of Information Act has gained a new importance as a source of information. But critics accuse the government of deliberately making the process difficult — Mr. Leopold must often sue to get documents.
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 obsessively as Mr. Leopold. He 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.
News junkie 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 drops everything he is holding and rips them open like Christmas presents.
The rush of adrenaline, he said, can be compared to a cocaine high. Mr. Leopold 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 $300-a-day habit.
A decade ago, he was 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.
“I love the score,” he said. “So maybe there’s this drug-ish thing in me that still exists, maybe that was always part of my personality... Particularly when it is from the government! I just got you to give me your own documents, you know!”
- New York Times News Service
