Jason Leopold, perhaps the internet’s best known user of the Freedom of Information Act, was in the middle of suing the federal government for access to emails to a high-level political figure when the New York Times broke a story out from under him.
“At Vice, my last leg there, and this may be a sore point for some people, it was my FOIA request that led to the release of all of Hilary Clinton’s emails,” Leopold says. Now at Bloomberg as part of the company’s investigative reporting team, he previously worked at Buzzfeed News and, earlier, Vice, where he gained his reputation for filing FOIA requests for public records at the state and federal level.
Leopold was interested in learning about her work as Secretary of State under President Barack Obama, because she was expected to become the Democratic nominee for president in 2016. “I thought it would be great insight into how she would perform as president to know how the nation’s top diplomat performed behind the scenes. I asked for all of her emails. At the time, I had no idea she had a private server. When I filed the FOIA request and the subsequent lawsuit in January 2015, the New York Times then broke the story that she had a private email server and the State Department didn’t even have any of her email records. The lawsuit I filed was already working its way through the court.”
Lost in the ensuing scandal was the purpose behind Leopold’s lawsuit and initial inquiry; informing the public about Clinton’s work and insight into how she might operate as president.
“What the records showed was how she handled human rights issues, issues that related to the release of certain detainees at Guantanamo, immigration issues. There were a lot of important issues that would’ve helped the public understand how the nation’s top diplomat was handling matters of foreign policy,” he says.
Jason Leopold, an investigative reporter with Bloomberg News, is known for his aggressive use of the Freedom of Information Act to research stories. He discusses the need for greater transparency in public records and his views on the future of FOIA in U.S.
