Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance
By Ian Parker, The New Yorker
29 August 18
A leftist journalist’s bruising crusade against establishment Democrats—and
their Russia obsession.
Like a man in the first draft of a limerick, Tennys Sandgren is a tennis player
from Tennessee. Last winter, after scraping his way onto the list of the top
hundred professional players, he secured a spot at the Australian Open. He
advanced to the quarter-finals. At a press conference, he responded happily to
questions about his unexpected achievement. Then someone asked him about his
Twitter feed. Sandgren had tweeted, retweeted, or “liked” disparaging remarks
about Muslims and gays; he had highlighted an article suggesting that recent
migration into Europe could be described as “Operation European Population
Replacement”; he had called Marx’s ideas worse than Hitler’s. He had also
promoted the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which accuses Hillary Clinton of
human trafficking. Sandgren told reporters that, though he didn’t support the
alt-right, he did find “some of the content interesting.”
This became a small news story. Sandgren then lost his quarter-final, and, at
the subsequent press conference, he read a statement condemning the media’s
willingness to “turn neighbor against neighbor.” Later that day, he was
surprised to receive a supportive message from Glenn Greenwald, the journalist,
whom he followed on Twitter. (Sandgren also followed Roger Federer, Peter
Thiel, and Paul Joseph Watson, of Infowars.)
Greenwald, a former lawyer who, in 2013, was one of the reporters for a
Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Guardian on Edward Snowden’s disclosures
about the National Security Agency, is a longtime critic, from the left, of
centrist and liberal policymakers and pundits. During the past two years, he
has further exiled himself from the mainstream American left by responding with
skepticism and disdain to reports of Russian government interference in the
2016 Presidential election. On Twitter, where he has nearly a million
followers, and at the Intercept, the news Web site that he co-founded five
years ago, and as a frequent guest on “Democracy Now!,” the daily progressive
radio and TV broadcast, Greenwald has argued that the available evidence
concerning Russian activity has indicated nothing especially untoward; he has
declared that those who claim otherwise are in denial about the ineptitude of
the Democrats and of Hillary Clinton, and are sometimes prone to McCarthyite
hysteria. These arguments, underpinned by a distaste for banal political
opinions and a profound distrust of American institutions—including the C.I.A.,
the F.B.I., and Rachel Maddow—have put an end to his appearances on MSNBC,
where he considers himself now banned, but they have given him a place on
Tucker Carlson’s show, on Fox News, and in Tennys Sandgren’s Twitter feed.
Greenwald is also a tennis fan—and a regular, sweary player. He recently began
working on a documentary about his adolescent fascination with Martina
Navratilova.
Sandgren told me that Greenwald’s message had celebrated his success in the
tournament, adding, “He knows quite a lot about tennis—enough to know it was
the result of my lifetime. And he wanted to encourage me in that particular
moment to continue to learn, to continue to grow, and to remember to be kind—to
yourself and to your critics.”
Greenwald has experienced his own share of criticism, but is not known for
showing kindness to critics. Michael Hayden, the former director of the C.I.A.
and the N.S.A., has written that debating him was like looking “the devil in
the eye.” Leading American progressives—speaking off the record, and
apologizing for what they describe as cowardice—call Greenwald a bully and a
troll. One told me that “he makes everything war.” The spouse of one of
Greenwald’s friends visualizes him as the angry emoji. On Twitter, he has
little use for agree-to-disagree courtesies, or humor: he presses on. More than
one tweet has started with “No, you idiot.” He’ll tweet “Go fuck yourself” to a
user with twenty or so followers. A few years ago, Greenwald had a Twitter
disagreement with Imani Gandy, a legal journalist, who tweets as
@AngryBlackLady; another Twitter user, in support of Greenwald, proposed to
Gandy that “Obama could rape a nun live on NBC and you’d say we weren’t seeing
what we were seeing.” Greenwald replied, “No—she’d say it was justified &
noble—that he only did it to teach us about the evils of rape.”
Sandgren thanked Greenwald for his message, and the next day tweeted an apology
for an old post in which he’d described his “eyes bleeding” after visiting a
gay club. A month later, in February, Sandgren played in Brazil, at the Rio
Open. Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro with his husband, David Miranda, their
two sons, and two dozen dogs, former strays; Sandgren offered Greenwald and his
children tickets, and they all met at the venue. Video of one match shows
Greenwald, in the front row, applauding every point with dad-outing gusto. He
and Sandgren subsequently formed what Greenwald called a “very intense”
friendship.
Sandgren described their trade in tennis and politics. “Glenn asks me what it’s
like to return Ivo Karlović’s serve—a six-foot-eleven guy—and then I ask him
what’s going on in the political world,” he said. “Maybe he respects the fact
that I’m very interested in learning.” Greenwald has sent him YouTube links to
speeches he has made. Since meeting Greenwald, Sandgren has also watched Oliver
Stone’s film “Snowden,” in which Greenwald is played by Zachary Quinto, the
actor best known for his role in the “Star Trek” movies. Sandgren recalled
thinking, “They got Spock to play Glenn? That’s fitting: very interested in
factual information, truth and reason and logic. And, if he does get a little
frustrated or angry, then look out.”
Greenwald told me about his friendship with Sandgren during one of several
recent conversations at his home. We sat in a high-ceilinged room with a baby
grand piano; the space echoed with the sound of dogs barking—and with the sound
of Greenwald responding to the barking by shouting, “The fuck?”
Greenwald, who is fifty-one, and was brought up in Florida, has lived largely
in Rio for thirteen years. For most of that time, he and Miranda, a
city-council member, rented a home on a hillside above the city, surrounded by
forest and monkeys. Last year, they moved to a more residential neighborhood.
The house is in a baronial-modernist style, and built around a forty-foot-tall
boulder that feels like the work of a sculptor tackling Freudian themes: it
exists partly indoors and partly out. Greenwald has a pool, and his street is
gated. A thousand feet away is the crush of Rocinha, Brazil’s largest favela,
from which Greenwald often hears gunfire.
He seemed happy. He was wearing shorts and flip-flops; he has a soft handshake
and an easy, teasing manner that he knows will likely confound people who
expect the sustained contentiousness that he employs online and on TV. (On
cable news shows, Greenwald draws his lower lip over his bottom teeth, blinks
slowly, and seems able to state his position on the Espionage Act of 1917 while
inhaling.) Greenwald, though untroubled about being thought relentless, told me
that he was “actually trying to become less acerbic, less gratuitously
combative” in public debates. He recently became attached to the idea of
mindfulness, and he keeps a Buddha and a metal infinity loop on a shelf behind
the sofa; a room upstairs is used only for meditation. He has turned to
religious and mystical reading, and has reflected that, in middle age, one’s
mood “is more about integrating with the world.”
Greenwald has tried to cut back on social media. “My No. 1 therapeutic goal is
to reduce my Twitter usage,” he said. He gave a glimpse of his relationship
with that site when, half seriously, he recalled his reaction to a difficult
moment of parenting: “I went to pick a bunch of fights on Twitter to get it out
of my system.” Miranda used to encourage Twitter breaks by unplugging the Wi-Fi
router; a few months ago, he took away Greenwald’s phone. Miranda said that
“Glenn receives so much hate” on Twitter. He went on, “Subconsciously, that
goes somewhere. To not be exposed to that energy, it’s better for him.”
Greenwald no longer carries a phone; he does all his tweeting from a laptop,
and aims to finish before lunch. He told me this at the end of a day that
included an afternoon tweet calling a Clinton-campaign official a “drooling
partisan hack.” Reminded of this, Greenwald said, “I’m still a work in
progress,” and laughed. Several weeks later, he announced to colleagues, on
Slack, that he was further disengaging from Twitter; he also deleted
twenty-seven thousand old tweets, saying that there was a risk that their
meaning could be distorted. This was two weeks after he had criticized Matt
Yglesias, a journalist at Vox, for regularly deleting recent tweets, “like a
coward,” so that “you have no accountability for what you say.”
Greenwald told me that he and Tennys Sandgren had been communicating every day.
“He was pilloried in a way that I just found so ugly,” he said. “I could tell
he wasn’t a bad person. He worked his whole life to get to this point, and the
moment he gets there they turn him into Hitler.” When I later disputed this
description, Greenwald pointed to unfriendly reactions from Serena Williams and
from John McEnroe; McEnroe had responded by making what Greenwald called a
“revolting” video about tennis players contending with prejudice. Greenwald
then acknowledged that, having perceived Sandgren as vulnerable—as someone
suddenly exposed to intense public scrutiny—he might have misread the dominant
tone. (The most forceful mainstream headline was on Deadspin: “What Does
Pizzagate Truther Tennys Sandgren Find ‘Interesting’ About the Alt-Right?”)
Greenwald was particularly struck by Sandgren’s “brave and defiant” second
press conference. In response to the media’s “bullying groupthink,” he hadn’t
apologized. This perception of Sandgren’s circumstances helps illuminate
Greenwald’s political writing, which focusses on dramas of strength and
weakness, and on the corruptions of empires. Greenwald writes aggressively
about perceived aggression. His instinct is to identify, in any conflict, the
side that is claiming authority or incumbency, and then to throw his weight
against that claim, in favor of the unauthorized or the unlicensed—the
intruder. Invariably, the body with authority is malign and corrupt; any
criticisms of the intruder are vilifications or “smears.” He rarely weighs
counter-arguments in public, and his policy goals are more often implied than
spoken.
Greenwald’s model will satisfy readers, on Twitter and elsewhere, to the extent
that they recognize the same malignancy, or agent of oppression. Many might
find this kind of framing appropriate, and inspiringly forthright, in a
discussion of policing in Ferguson, Missouri, or of the American meat
industry’s efforts to thwart animal-rights activists—a current interest of
Greenwald’s. Many readers, though certainly not all, could also agree that
Edward Snowden had engaged in a courageous insurgency. (In Laura Poitras’s 2014
documentary, “Citizenfour,” Greenwald tells Snowden that, once Snowden’s
identity becomes known, “the fearlessness and the ‘fuck you’ to the bullying
tactics has got to be completely pervading everything we do.”) Fewer people,
though, would interpret Sandgren’s story this way, if showing sympathy for him
must be accompanied by disparagement of everyone else—if one must agree that
the reporters covering Sandgren were bullying when they noted that a public
figure, however naïvely, had promoted conspiracy-minded and white-supremacist
ideas.
In the buildup to the 2016 election, Greenwald detected a conflict between
actors defiantly contemptuous of American norms—the Republican Presidential
nominee, WikiLeaks, Vladimir Putin—and the establishment forces that he hates,
including the U.S. intelligence services, “warmonger” neoconservatives like
William Kristol, and big-money Democrats. That August, in an Intercept article
that used the word “smear” a dozen times, and ended with an image of Senator
Joseph McCarthy, Greenwald argued that “those who question, criticize or are
perceived to impede Hillary Clinton’s smooth, entitled path to the White House
are vilified as stooges, sympathizers and/or agents of Russia: Trump,
WikiLeaks, Sanders, The Intercept, Jill Stein.” He wrote that both Trump and
Stein, the Green Party’s Presidential candidate, were being “vilified for
advocating ways to reduce U.S./Russian tensions.” (Even though this article
included Trump on the list of those being “smeared,” Greenwald told me that he
had only ever invoked McCarthyism in reference to “Democrats who accused me and
others like me of being Kremlin agents.”) After the election, he scorned those
“screaming ‘Putin,’ over and over.” Later, on an Intercept podcast, he said
that Democrats had embraced, without evidence, various “conspiracy theories”
about collusion; American liberals were caught up in an “insane, insidious,
xenophobic, jingoistic kind of craziness.”
In the period since then—these months of Guccifer 2.0 and Natalia Veselnitskaya
and Carter Page—Greenwald has continued to portray the Trump-Russia story as,
essentially, one of rotten American élites and unruly insurgents. Although he
has acknowledged the failings (not to mention the indictments) of some people
in the insurgent category, he has focussed his editorial energy on documenting
the past infractions and continuing misjudgments of people—in the intelligence
agencies, the Department of Justice, Congress, and the media—who have provided
apparent evidence of Russian interference and Trump-campaign collusion.
Greenwald has questioned their reliability, and has disputed their evidence, to
a degree that has frustrated even some colleagues at the Intercept. On Twitter,
Greenwald recently described the self-identified “resistance” to Trump as “the
first #Resistance in history that venerates security state agencies.” He has
denounced the congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House
Intelligence Committee, who has sought to investigate Trump-Russia in the face
of Republican obstruction, as “one of the most hawkish, pro-militarism,
pro-spying members of the Democratic Party.” He has tweeted, “I don’t regard
the F.B.I. as an upholder of the rule of law. I regard it as a subverter of
it.” Greenwald told me, “Robert Mueller was the fucking F.B.I. chief who
rounded up Muslims for George Bush after 9/11, and now, if you go to hacker
conferences, there are people who wear his image, like he’s Che Guevara, on
their shirt.” Maddow and other liberals may show respect to the former C.I.A.
director John Brennan when he accuses Trump of colluding with Russia, but
Greenwald’s view is that Brennan, who sanctioned extraordinary rendition,
should be shunned.
These critiques have changed Greenwald’s place in American political life. “My
reach has actually expanded,” he told me. “A lot of Democrats have unfollowed
me and a lot of conservatives or independent people have replaced them, which
has made my readership more diverse, and more trans-ideological, in a way
that’s actually increased my influence.” His audience now ranges from leftist
opponents of Hillary Clinton, such as Susan Sarandon and Max Blumenthal, to
right-wing figures such as Sebastian Gorka and Donald Trump, Jr.
To liberals grateful for institutional counterweights to the Trump
Administration’s crookedness, cruelty, and mendacity, Greenwald has been
discouraging: U.S. institutions have long been broken, he maintains, and can
offer only illusory comfort. To protest the flouting of American norms is to
disregard America’s perdition—from drone strikes and unwarranted surveillance
to the Democratic Party’s indebtedness to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Shortly before Trump’s Inauguration, Greenwald wrote an article for the
Intercept titled “The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using
Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer.” The Drudge Report promoted the article,
and it went viral. This had the effect of offering the phrase “deep
state”—which, until then, had been a murmur among political scientists and
fringe bloggers—as a gift to Trump defenders. Roger Stone referred to the
article in an interview with Alex Jones, on Infowars; Greenwald spoke of
“deep-state overlords” on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” According to data from the
GDELT Project, the phrase “deep state” then took off—first on Fox, then on
other networks, and then in the tweets of the President and his family.
Betsy Reed, the editor-in-chief of the Intercept, recently told me that “Glenn
has a core of incredibly passionate and dedicated followers.” But, she added,
she is wary of “a kind of pale imitation of Glenn—people who may be partly
inspired by him, but don’t have the nuance or intelligence that he has.” She
was referring to Russia skeptics of the left, on Twitter and elsewhere, “who
are so convinced that they are being lied to all the time that anything that
the intelligence community says can’t possibly be true.” Reed’s view is that,
at this point, “it’s not helpful to the left and to all the candidates and
causes we favor to continue to doubt the existence of some kind of relationship
between Russia and the Trump campaign. We know some basic contours of it now,
thanks to Mueller, but I think we may learn more. And we can’t refuse to see
what’s in front of us.”
Joan Walsh, the national-affairs correspondent of The Nation, and Greenwald’s
former editor at Salon, recently said that left-wing Trump-Russia skepticism
contains “real disdain for what the Democratic Party has become.” She went on,
“That would mean its closeness to finance, and Wall Street.” But she thinks
that it also means “the ascendance of women and people of color in the Party,
and the fact that that coalition defeated Bernie Sanders.” (After the election,
in an e-mail to the Intercept staff, Greenwald, a Sanders admirer, defended
himself vigorously against internal suggestions that the site’s coverage of
Clinton had been “anti-woman.”) A former Intercept staff member told me, “I
feel bad for Glenn. I feel that Trump winning is the worst possible thing that
could have happened to him, and it sort of ruined him as a valuable voice in
American discourse.” Reed told me that Greenwald would surely have been “more
comfortable being part of the #Resistance” had Clinton become President.
In 2011, Greenwald published a book whose title—“With Liberty and Justice for
Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful”—could
serve as a headline for much of what he had written in the previous six years.
He had given up a career as a litigator in New York, moved to Brazil, and
started to write, first as a blogger and then as a columnist for Salon. In the
book’s first chapter, he wrote, “It has become a virtual consensus among the
elites that their members are so indispensable to the running of American
society that vesting them with immunity from prosecution—even for the most
egregious crimes—is not only in their interest but in our interest, too.”
When Greenwald and I first met in Rio, we sat at a dining table made of dark,
heavy wood, and he served extraordinarily strong coffee. I asked him whether,
despite his wariness about the discourse surrounding Trump and Russia, he took
any satisfaction from the discomforts of élites, such as Michael Cohen and Paul
Manafort, who were losing layers of immunity each day.
“On one level, I agree,” he said. “It’s great that people like Paul Manafort
are finally being held accountable for their sleazy K Street practices, and
their money laundering and all of that.” He talks fast, and often at a volume
suited to a poor Skype connection. “But I really don’t think it’s about
justice. I think the people who are doing this are genuinely offended by the
entire Trump circle, in part for political and ideological reasons, and in part
because he has broken all of the rules of their world, in terms of who gets to
be in power, and what you have to do to get it.” He went on, “They’re just
using the law as a political weapon against Trump, just as Brazilian élites are
using it against Lula.” He was referring to Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the
leftist former President, who had just begun a prison term for corruption and
money laundering.
Greenwald told me, “I don’t think that, once Trump leaves office, we’re going
to have a revolution in law where rich and powerful people are going to be held
accountable in the way that poor people are.” Trump is a criminal, he said,
surrounded by “fifth-tier grifters” who, under normal circumstances, would be
“generating PowerPoints to defraud pensioners.” But most public expressions of
distress about corruption in Trump’s circle struck him as a “pretense.” He
said, “The people who hate Trump the most are the people who have been running
Washington for decades. It’s not so much that they’re bothered by his
corruption—they’re bothered by his inability to prettify and mask it.”
Greenwald then made an analogy that placed a Trump associate like Manafort in
the unexpected role of a racial-bias victim: “Let’s say there’s a city where
drivers are driving recklessly, and lots of people are being killed because of
it. And the police department decides that, from now on, if we see any black
drivers speeding, we’re going to give them a ticket, but we’re going to let
white drivers continue to speed with impunity.”
To Greenwald, an agonized response to Trump carries with it the delusional
proposition that previous Presidents were upstanding. He said, extravagantly,
“When Trump invited President Sisi”—the Egyptian strongman—“to the White House,
everybody acted like this is the first time an American President ever embraced
a dictator.”
I asked him if anti-Trump sentiment implies that America, absent Trump, is
virtuous. “It does, yes,” Greenwald said. “What was the campaign slogan of
Hillary Clinton? She said, ‘America is already great.’ This was the platform
that Democrats ran on.”
Becoming an expatriate served Greenwald’s reputation. However pleasant (and, in
the end, moneyed) his life became, he remained apart from despised American
élites—and felt able to tweet that Katie Couric’s purchase of a
twelve-million-dollar Manhattan condo had underscored her remove from “the
political impulses & circumstances of ordinary Americans.” There was also a
hint of martyred exile. The Defense of Marriage Act, passed in 1996, denied
Miranda the immigration opportunities of a spouse, and, over the years,
Greenwald reminded people who questioned his long absence from America that he
was a victim of discrimination. “I could throw that back in people’s faces,” he
said. “And then, fortunately for the whole world but unfortunately for that
excuse, in 2013 the Supreme Court struck down that law. So I lost my excuse,
and now I just admit I’m here because I love the country.”
After it turned dark, we drove across the city to a television studio, in order
to allow Greenwald to have an argument with Eli Lake, the Bloomberg columnist,
whom Greenwald has called a “rabid cheerleader” for the Iraq War. Miranda had
been delayed at work, so Greenwald brought the children. They are brothers, now
aged nine and ten, from the poor northeast of Brazil; the couple adopted them
last fall. They sat in the back seat, looking amused and a little restless,
alongside a temporary member of the family’s staff—a security officer hired
after Marielle Franco, one of Miranda’s colleagues and closest friends, was
murdered, in March. Franco, like Miranda, was a black, gay, working-class
member of the city council. In what was likely a political crime, Franco’s car
was followed one evening by men who then shot her and her driver.
A jacket and a pressed shirt were hanging by an open back window. We drove down
to the beach, then followed the ocean, eastward, through the neighborhoods of
Ipanema (where Greenwald met Miranda, in 2005, on a gay section of the beach,
at the start of a vacation) and Copacabana. Here, Greenwald’s sons saw a friend
playing soccer on the sand, and while we were stopped at a traffic light they
repeatedly yelled his name, laughing after they failed to get his attention.
Greenwald speaks Portuguese, but the boys have only begun to learn English, so
he was speaking privately when he complained to me about how, a few days
earlier, they’d woken him at dawn. “They were fighting over a video game,” he
said. “I almost murdered them. I almost drowned them in the pool.” (He was
laughing—he uses the same language when describing spousal disharmony.) “I
called my mother later that day, and I said, ‘They’re fighting so much, and I
just hate their fighting.’ And she’s, like, ‘This is proof there’s karmic
justice, because all you did was fight with your brother, all day and night.
I’m so happy that you’re getting this.’ And I’d completely forgotten. I was,
‘Oh, my God, that’s so true, I hated my brother.’ We love each other, but . . .”
Greenwald was an infant when his parents moved from Queens to Lauderdale Lakes,
Florida, and he was six when they separated. In a later conversation, Greenwald
said of his father, “He was fucking the woman next door. They didn’t divorce
because of that, but it was a factor.” His father, an accountant, moved into an
apartment, but for a while he often stayed with the neighbor. “I would see him
in the morning coming out of that house,” Greenwald said. “Still a good
father—I had good parents—but that was the first breach.” His father died in
2016, after a chaotic and drunken decline; he had refused all help, and had not
taken medication. When Glenn told a therapist that he’d found this refusal
enraging, her response had a Greenwaldian tint: “She’s, like, ‘I see this as
such a powerful and courageous thing he did—he basically told all of you to go
fuck yourselves, that he was going to live his life, and die, the way he
wanted.’ ”
Greenwald’s older son, he told me, has frequent bursts of anger, which reminded
him of his own emotions at that age. He noted, “What I went through is nothing
compared to what he’s been through”; still, he said, “I fought with everybody,
I argued with everybody.” At school, he said, he “felt smarter than my
teachers,” adding, “Things came very easy to me, so I felt like I could get
away with a lot.” He identified as poor, in part because his house was uncared
for: roaches, holes in the couch. And, when he began to understand that he was
gay, he felt that others judged him to be “radically broken and diseased and
evil.”
Greenwald’s planned documentary, produced by Reese Witherspoon’s company, will
trace the personal and cultural impact of Navratilova’s coming out, in 1981,
when he was fourteen. In a proposal for the film, Greenwald frames his regard
for Navratilova in his preferred way, with reference to her “radical defiance,”
“vulnerability,” and “incredible strength.” (He presents her as someone who
never described herself as “bisexual”—a hedge used by some gay celebrities of
the era. This is wrong: Navratilova did sometimes call herself bisexual,
notably in her 1985 autobiography.)
Greenwald noted that some gay teens respond to persecution by assimilating, or
by escaping into the arts. He then said, “My strategy was: you have waged war
on me, and now I’m going to wage war back on you. I had to hide who I was,
because it was shameful and wrong. And I wanted to make them feel the same
way—‘No, you’re shameful and wrong.’ ” This force, he said, had propelled his
success on debate teams in high school and in college, at George Washington
University.
The TV studio was in a tower above a mall. Leaving the boys to run around in
the stores with the security officer, we went to the thirty-seventh floor. It
was about 8 P.M. Greenwald disappeared for a minute, and returned wearing
self-administered makeup, a jacket, a shirt, and a tie, as well as his shorts
and flip-flops. He contrasted his preparedness with the baggier TV impression
made by Noam Chomsky, a friend and a frequent ideological ally: “He won’t make
compromises to have greater access—he won’t put on a shirt and tie, he won’t
speak in sound bites. I think you have the obligation, if you believe in what
you’re saying, to maximize your audience.” Chomsky and Greenwald have described
the Trump Presidency differently. In a recent television interview, Chomsky
said that Trump is an agent of American élites more than he is an offense to
them. He also recognized a stark moral line between the Democratic Party and
the Republican Party, arguing that the G.O.P.’s opposition to addressing
climate change has made it “the most dangerous organization in human history.”
Greenwald sat on a stool, and a technician affixed an earpiece. As he waited
for an Al Jazeera studio in Washington to be ready, he put on red-framed
glasses and read from his laptop. Hearing Lake’s voice in his ear, he said,
“Hi, Eli. Do you like my glasses?”
Greenwald and Lake debated the case for American bombing in Syria, as a
response to a recent chemical attack in Douma, which had killed dozens of
people. (The next day, U.S. missiles hit three targets in Syria.) Lake favored
intervention; Greenwald did not. He briefly acknowledged the scale of human
suffering, calling it “a problem in the world that’s really horrendous,” but he
emphasized, as Chomsky has done, that a humanitarian rationale for American
armed intervention was “generally the excuse that’s used” for geopolitical
maneuvering.
One of Greenwald’s debating assets is charmlessness. He brings scant greenroom
bonhomie onstage, and rarely smiles; he seems content to risk appearing
disagreeable, or wrongheaded. This approach works best when it is set against
eye-rolling disdain or fear. Lake was measured and genial. After the segment,
Greenwald felt dissatisfied. “I just know Eli too well,” he said. “We’ve just
fought and argued on every medium.” Lake’s views were “horrible”—he was a
“hard-core neocon and a loyalist to Israel”—but he “doesn’t take himself super
seriously.” He’d also been supportive of the Snowden reporting.
Lake later told me that he thinks Greenwald is mistaken in believing “that
everything that the U.S. government does is malevolent.” But he added, “In a
weird way, I’m grateful that there’s somebody as articulate, unrelenting, and
consistent as Glenn making that argument.” He also described the discomforts of
being criticized by Greenwald on Twitter: “There’s a Greenwald Effect,” he
said. “His followers are like the flying monkeys in ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ They
crush you in your mentions.”
“Kane, shut the fuck up—seriously,” Greenwald said. Some of his dogs are
allowed inside; others live outdoors, and now and then strike wolflike poses at
the summit of the boulder. Because there was always someone arriving at or
leaving the house—friends, couriers, domestic staff—there was always a new
reason to bark.
During the Presidential transition, the Washington Post ran a story with the
headline “RUSSIAN HACKERS PENETRATED U.S. ELECTRICITY GRID THROUGH A UTILITY IN
VERMONT, U.S. OFFICIALS SAY.” This didn’t hold up well: a computer at
Burlington Electric had triggered a malware alert, but it may have been false,
and the computer wasn’t connected to the grid. The paper appended a correction
and published a self-admonishing article by its media critic. Greenwald,
unsatisfied, went on Tucker Carlson’s show and called the Post story “the
grandest humiliation possible.” He also wrote a dozen tweets, and a
two-thousand-word article. “The level of groupthink, fearmongering, coercive
peer pressure, and über-nationalism has not been seen since the halcyon days of
2002 and 2003,” he argued. A year later, CNN and other outlets published, and
then retracted, the claim that, in the fall of 2016, Donald Trump, Jr., had
learned about hacked Democratic National Committee e-mails before WikiLeaks
posted them online. Greenwald declared the error a “humiliation orgy,” and he
appeared on Laura Ingraham’s show, above a chyron reading “MALFEASANCE IN THE
MAINSTREAM MEDIA.” He claimed that there had been a “huge series” of media
mistakes about Russian interference.
Greenwald’s other critiques of Trump-era reporting—of oversold scoops and
neglected non-Trump stories, from Yemen to Catalonia—are valuable. But it’s not
easy to see that the media has been disgraced by a handful of mistakes that
were quickly corrected. To many people, Greenwald has looked ravenous and
gleeful. He disputed this characterization. “The screwups have been quite
numerous,” he told me. Errors are inevitable, he allowed, but “my problem with
these mistakes is that they’re all in the same direction of exaggerating the
Russian threat.” One could argue that Carlson and other Fox journalists may
have made errors of threat-underestimation by, say, breezing past Trump-Russia
revelations or failing to pursue investigations. But it might be fairer to say
that, until we learn all there is to know about the Trump Administration’s
involvement in the Russian scheme, the seriousness of any journalistic neglect
is hard to measure. Either way, Greenwald surely can’t be confident that he’s
witnessed a grievous imbalance in screwups.
He sought to clarify his position on Russian interference: “I’ve said that of
course it’s possible that Russia and Putin might have hacked, because this is
the kind of thing that Russia does to the U.S., and that the U.S. has done to
Russia, and to everybody else in the world—and far worse—for decades.” He’d
never insisted “on the narrative that Russia didn’t do it.” When James Risen,
the former Times investigative reporter, who joined the Intercept last year,
recently debated Greenwald on a podcast—a public airing of internal
tensions—Greenwald bristled at the suggestion that he had ever considered the
idea of Russian interference a hoax. “I never said anything like that,” he
said, explaining that his demand for serious evidence was connected to the
deceptions propagated before the Iraq War.
If Greenwald has never proposed that a Russian hacking scheme was
inconceivable, his rhetoric hasn’t always signalled an open mind on the issue.
In the summer of 2016, he referred to narratives of Russian malfeasance as
smears. That October, the Department of Homeland Security and the director of
National Intelligence firmly accused the Russian government of hacking;
Greenwald characterized this as an “assertion” that presented “no evidence.”
(Classified intelligence is generally withheld.) Since then, as the accusation
has been fleshed out and gained almost universal acceptance, Greenwald has
chosen to highlight the commentary of people who sound deranged about Russian
interference. His work has sought to create the impression that the pervasive
voice of concern about the Trump-Russia story is found not in articles by
national-security reporters, including those at the Intercept, or in
congressional questioning of Erik Prince, or in Mueller’s indictments, but in
jokes and unhinged theories—in a Twitter oddball like Louise Mensch suggesting
that “Andrew Breitbart was murdered by Putin, just as the founder of RT was
murdered by Putin,” or in Howard Dean asking if the Intercept is funded by
Russia. When Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District
of New York, jokingly fantasized, on Twitter, about Jeff Bezos buying the
platform and then deleting Trump’s account, Greenwald described this as
“moronic, plutocratic dreck” and added “#Resist.” He received fourteen thousand
likes.
Tommy Vietor, Barack Obama’s former National Security Council spokesman and the
host of “Pod Save the World,” recently said of Greenwald, “He’s rightly
pointing out that there are some liberals, some Democrats and activists, who
ascribe every problem in the world to Russian interference.” (For years,
Greenwald mocked Vietor as an emblem of “imperial Washington,” but the two men
have had a slight rapprochement, to become “sort of friends,” in Greenwald’s
description.) Vietor continued, “That said, clearly something happened.”
Greenwald’s distaste for #Resistance dreck, and for its reach into the
mainstream, is surely sincere, but his unabated marshalling of it has looked
tactical. Even if Greenwald came to accept that some kind of intrusion by some
Russians was likely, he could still continue to taint the idea by highlighting
nuttiness.
“Ninety per cent of what he’s done on the Trump-Russia story is media
criticism,” Risen told me. He said that Greenwald, through such commentary, has
implied that the Trump-Russia story is bogus, even as he has maintained an
official agnosticism. This is disingenuous, Risen said, adding, “I wish he was
more honest and open in the way he wrote about this.”
Greenwald told me that his role was “to evaluate convincing evidence and then
report to my readers what it is that happened, based not on my beliefs but on
the actual evidence.” Such a stance could never be “disproved.” Betsy Reed
recalled Greenwald telling her that it’s never wrong to be skeptical. One could
argue that overriding, sustained skepticism, in response to reports of bad
acts, could indeed be a mistake, and wouldn’t be an ideal posture for, say, a
911 dispatcher.
Greenwald asked me, “What evidence has ever been presented for the central
claim that Putin ordered the D.N.C. and John Podesta’s e-mail to be hacked, as
opposed to the hacking being done by people of Russian nationality?” Did
Greenwald dispute that Guccifer 2.0, the persona responsible for distributing
hacked D.N.C. e-mails to WikiLeaks and other outlets, had come into focus as an
agent of Russian military intelligence? (A month before the 2016 election,
Greenwald co-wrote an article, about the Clinton campaign’s handling of the
press, that was based on exclusive access to material supplied by Guccifer
2.0.) We were speaking shortly before the indictments, in July, of twelve
Russian intelligence officers. I mentioned a recent article in the Daily Beast,
“ ‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian
Intelligence Officer,” which had been co-authored by Spencer Ackerman, a former
Guardian colleague of Greenwald’s who had worked on the early Snowden stories.
“Each story you can dissect and pick apart, right?” Greenwald said. “They’re
based on anonymous sources. They’re based on evidence that you can question.”
Ackerman told me that he liked and respected Greenwald, and that “people can be
interested in what they’re interested in.” But, he said, “it’s conspicuous when
they’re not interested in a massive story for which the simplest explanation is
that there was a Russian intelligence operation to elect Donald Trump
President.” He added, “Some people are interested in reporting this out. Some
people—I would include myself—are interested in reporting this out without any
contradiction of the impulse that led us to report the Snowden story. Some
people are not.”
Greenwald and I talked about his definition of “evidence.” In the case of
Russia, he seemed to use the word to mean “proof.” His evidentiary needs in
this context could be contrasted with his swift, easy arrival at certainty in
many other contexts. Greenwald assured me that Tennys Sandgren “didn’t have a
racist bone in his body.” He had recently tweeted that Jeremy Corbyn, the
leader of Britain’s Labour Party, was not anti-Semitic, and that suggestions
otherwise were “guilt-by-association trash.” It would be truer to say that
Corbyn’s record provides some evidence of anti-Semitism, and that supporting
him requires a response to that.
Shortly before we met, Greenwald tweeted a link to an article about the
poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, in the South of England, using Novichok,
a nerve agent. It was “100% clear,” Greenwald wrote, that Boris Johnson, the
British Foreign Secretary, was “lying” when he told a reporter that British
scientists had confirmed that the agent had originated in Russia. To be
precise, the scientists had merely identified the chemical, not its origin
(though the Russians invented it). Johnson’s remarks were inexact, but he
almost surely wasn’t being deceitful. To show one’s skepticism about an
official narrative by proclaiming that one knows the narrative to be a lie
could be defended as an act of anti-authoritarian pluck. But it doesn’t tell
readers “what it is that happened.” Asked about this tweet, Greenwald said,
with good grace, that a British friend had made the same point to him. Perhaps
he had erred. Greenwald’s offline openness to rebuttal—in contrast to his
online bloodlust and sarcasm—was always a nice surprise. But he hadn’t
corrected his remarks, which were retweeted several hundred times.
“We have, all the time, different levels of evidentiary certainty based on the
context, based on the role that we’re playing,” Greenwald said. To allege
Russian interference in 2016 was to levy a charge against “a longtime adversary
of the United States, one that is still in possession of thousands of nuclear
weapons aimed at American cities.” He continued, “Before we all accuse that
country of having done something so grave as have its leader order the hacking
of these e-mails in order to interfere in an election, I think the evidence we
demand ought to be pretty high.”
Was the charge “grave”? He had just called it the stuff of everyday
international relations. “I personally don’t think it’s grave,” he said. “But
there are millions of Americans who believe the election of Trump is this grave
threat. So if you convince them that what has endangered them is Putin—you hear
Democrats comparing this to 9/11 or Pearl Harbor—that’s really dangerous
rhetoric. I don’t think it’s particularly grave at all, even if it’s true. I
think it’s a very pedestrian event.” The risk, then—one also identified by
President Trump—was that unfounded American hysteria could set off a nuclear
war. Put another way: the choice is between Greenwald and the end of the world.
He later said, “If there was evidence inside the U.S. government that genuinely
proved collusion—an intercepted call, an e-mail—it would have been leaked by
now.” (He seemed to be disregarding the discipline displayed by Mueller’s
investigation.) He added that, even if Putin himself had ordered the hacking,
“and worked with WikiLeaks and Michael Cohen and Jared Kushner to distribute
the e-mails,” then this was still just “standard shit.”
I said that he sometimes seemed to be giving argumentative form to a
psychological preference: it was perhaps more satisfying to defend a besieged
opinion than to share an agreed one and thereby become tainted with tribalism.
This was “totally accurate,” he said, kindly. Then: “Maybe not totally.” He
went on, “I think the role we end up playing in politics, in public discourse,
in life, is almost always a by-product of who we are psychologically.”
Greenwald’s preference, then, is to enact the dynamics of an unequal power
struggle, even as he describes one.
His choice of journalistic subjects was also pragmatic, he said. Over the
years, he could have written more often about gay rights, or abortion, areas
where his views largely conform to progressive orthodoxy. But he didn’t feel
that his time was “best spent saying things that zillions of other people are
already saying.”
Upon the release of Mueller’s July indictments, which contained detailed
descriptions of Russian methods, Greenwald tweeted that “indictments are
extremely easy to obtain & are proof of nothing.” He urged “skepticism toward
the claims of prosecutors who have turned the U.S. into a penal state, and
security state agencies which have turned the U.S. into a militaristic imperial
state.” After Michael Tracey, another journalist who is largely dismissive of
Trump-Russia reporting, wrote mockingly about the respect being paid to “our
Lord and savior Mueller,” Greenwald expressed fellowship by noting that the act
of “asking for evidence, and refusing to believe it until you see it, is
literally heretical.”
A few days later, on the phone, Greenwald had news. He had “talked to a bunch
of people and figured out what I thought, in the most rational way possible,”
and now regarded the indictments as genuine evidence of Russian hacking—the
first he’d seen in two years. To think otherwise, he said, “you’d pretty much
have to believe that Mueller and his team fabricated it all out of whole cloth,
which I don’t believe is likely.”
He hadn’t tweeted about this yet. He was still pondering the best way to
announce it. “I want it to be substantive—I don’t want it to be distorted,” he
said. “If I did it on Twitter, it would be ‘Oh, Glenn Greenwald admits he’s
wrong!’ I don’t actually think I’ve been wrong about anything.”
In 1994, not long after Greenwald graduated from N.Y.U. School of Law and took
a job that he quickly came to hate, at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, a New
York firm, he learned about Town Hall, a conservative forum, sponsored by
National Review and the Heritage Foundation, on Compuserve’s dial-up network.
He applied to join, at a cost of twenty-five dollars a month. In his teens,
Greenwald had been close to his paternal grandfather, a left-wing member of the
Lauderdale Lakes city council. After his grandfather retired, Greenwald, at
eighteen and again at twenty-two, ran for the same council—inspired more by the
promise of conflict than by an impatience to serve. (“I don’t think I’m a
politician,” he told me. “My skill is not making everybody like me.”) As a
student, Greenwald had paid little attention to politics. “There weren’t big
wars, big causes,” he said. But his career in competitive debating had been
stellar, and he knew that he disliked Rush Limbaugh conservatism. He joined
Town Hall “just to start fucking with them,” he said. “I guess it was trolling,
before trolling existed.” He posted comments as DerWilheim, a name chosen for
reasons he says he cannot recall. “I often think about how happy I am that
nobody will find those,” he said. “I’m pretty sure those things are gone.”
He was the forum’s exotic. “They knew I was gay and a lawyer in New York,” he
said. He found the community to be “incredibly welcoming.” In 1996, he flew to
Indiana to attend a Town Hall conference. “My friends were, ‘Are you fucking
insane?’ ”
He later added, “That early Internet experience—the Wild West—was really
important to my development. For gay people, and for anybody who felt any sense
of shame or constraint about their sexual identity and their sexual expression,
the Internet was this incredibly powerful tool. And not just sexually, but
whatever parts of yourself are there and you’re not really sure about and you
know you can’t really show most people. I think that part of my bond with
Snowden was that the Internet was so crucial to his own development.” Snowden
used to post on Ars Technica, about sex and programming, as TheTrueHOOHA.
Greenwald said of him, “He grew up in a lower-middle-class household in central
Maryland—very stultifying, and homogenous. When you have a place where you can
be anything, or do anything, or say anything, you realize how emancipating that
is, and to lose that is a huge loss.” In “Citizenfour,” Snowden says to
Greenwald, “I remember what the Internet was like before it was being watched.”
In 1996, Greenwald set up his own law firm. He didn’t vote in 2000, but after
9/11 he paid closer attention to politics, from a position of some confidence
in George W. Bush. Greenwald has written that, in 2003, he trusted Bush about
Iraq: “I accepted his judgment that American security would be enhanced by the
invasion of this sovereign country.” That trust was soon lost. And by 2005,
when Greenwald started his blog, he wrote as a critic of U.S. torture and
rendition policies, and of legal theories defending them.
But the blog’s name, Unclaimed Territory—a reference to “Deadwood,” the HBO
frontier drama—indicated Greenwald’s self-image as an independent spirit. When
he wrote that Howard Dean was “non-ideological, sensible, solidly mainstream,”
he was being nice. Bush Administration horrors were transgressions, not signs
of chronic imperial disorder. In 2005, Greenwald censured anti-Americanism,
which he defined as the inclination “to vigilantly search for America’s guilt
while downplaying, ignoring, or excusing the guilt of its enemies”—to be driven
by the idea that the U.S. “is a uniquely corrupt and evil country.”
The younger Greenwald might have blanched at a question Greenwald asked last
summer: “Who has brought more death, and suffering, and tyranny to the world
over the last six decades than the U.S. national security state?” At one point,
Greenwald told me that he saw no difference between Putin’s use of Novichok
against a political antagonist—if such a thing had happened—and Obama’s use of
military drones. “I don’t think the U.S. government is morally superior to the
Russian government in terms of the role it plays in the world,” he said.
Greenwald responded to Russia’s shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17,
in 2014, by tweeting a reference to the U.S. Navy’s shooting down of Iran Air
Flight 655, in 1988. When ISIS filmed a captured Jordanian pilot being burned
alive, in 2015, Greenwald immediately published a post on the Intercept about
civilian injuries from napalm, during the Vietnam War, and from U.S. drone
strikes. His headline was “Burning Victims to Death: Still a Common Practice.”
In 2006, he wrote a slim, sharp book, “How Would a Patriot Act?,” which became
a best-seller. Greenwald wrote fast; by 2008, he had published two more books.
He was an early adopter of Twitter, although in 2009 he observed, on C-SPAN,
that it might “degrade our discourse even further.” (Greenwald told me, “I was
so prescient! I wish I’d listened to myself.”) His writing became more
polemical and less legalistic, emphasizing debate-team reiteration of an
argument’s greatest strength. As Joan Walsh, then at Salon, recently put it,
“He was not interested in convincing people—he was interested in telling the
truth.” His book “Great American Hypocrites,” published in 2008, opens with an
essay that repeats a single thought—that conservative politicians “talk tough
and prance around as wholesome warriors,” like John Wayne, while leading
personal lives that are “the exact opposite”—to the point that it reads like a
mechanical malfunction.
Before Barack Obama became President, in 2009, Greenwald was optimistic about
the candidate’s likely respect for civil liberties. He recalls telling himself,
“He’s a law professor, it’s embedded in him the way it is in me.” But Obama was
unable to close Guantánamo, and, as Greenwald saw it, he failed to stem abuses
of executive privilege, and security-state excesses. Ben Rhodes, a speechwriter
and a deputy national-security adviser in the Obama Administration, told me, “I
think that anything short of the President attempting to completely dismantle
the national-security apparatus of the United States was going to leave
Greenwald disappointed.” In Greenwald’s view, the start of the Obama Presidency
revealed “a dichotomy between the people who were actually serious in their
critiques of the Bush Administration and people who were just Democrats. And I
became the critic of the Democratic Party from the left.”
Walsh recalled that, “for a long time, we were absolutely on the same side, and
then suddenly we weren’t always.” She added, “He’s always had a libertarian
streak, but I thought of him as on the left—in his own lane, but on the left.”
As the divide between Greenwald and Obama supporters widened, “we did have
conversations about race and about gender,” Walsh said. “I thought he could
persuade people if he occasionally paid more attention to the concerns of black
people who saw Obama as being in an impossible situation, and being held to a
different standard. Those conversations I don’t think went anywhere.”
One morning at the house in Rio, Miranda met with some of his colleagues, and
with Greenwald, to discuss electoral strategy. Miranda, now thirty-three,
stopped attending school at thirteen. He later re-started his education, and in
the summer of 2013, while Greenwald was in Hong Kong with Snowden—in a
sour-smelling hotel room filled with a week’s worth of room-service
trays—Miranda was taking his final exams for a degree in advertising and
communications. Three years later, he ran for the Rio city council, as a member
of a small party, the Socialism and Liberty Party, and won. This fall, he is
running for Congress. As the meeting broke up, Greenwald said that he and
Miranda had decided to “make a film in Jacarezinho, the favela where David grew
up—huge and very deprived—and get David’s family with him, and talk about how
that formed him.” Miranda, who didn’t know his father and whose mother is dead,
is lighter-skinned than other family members, “but he is black,” Greenwald
said, “and it’s about how to claim that identity, not to let people take away
that identity.” (Miranda had recently stopped using hair-straightening
products.)
Greenwald, who had earlier compared Miranda’s electoral appeal to Obama’s,
acknowledged that, in 2016, after he interviewed Dilma Rousseff, in Brasília,
in the Presidential palace, he and Miranda wondered for a moment how easily the
building could accommodate two dozen dogs. When Miranda sat with us, Greenwald
used the phrase “if you’re successful in your congressional race,” and Miranda
laughed. “I will be!” he said. “Be positive, dude.”
Greenwald left the table to get food. Miranda said that, for most of Rio’s
electorate, his having a foreign partner wasn’t a liability, but he allowed
that his relationship with Greenwald had drawn some unfriendly local
commentary. (A senior media figure in the city later told me, with amusement,
that Miranda now spoke Portuguese with a slight American accent.) Miranda told
me, “I’m black and he’s white, a lawyer from New York. I’m younger and”—shrug,
slight hand movement—“good-looking, and I came from the favelas.” He went on,
“But here we are, thirteen years together. Two fucking kids who we love!
Twenty-four fucking dogs! I think we proved we love each other.”
Greenwald brought out some brittle baked pasta. Miranda, who takes cooking
seriously, looked despairing and said, “You overcooked his pasta, Glenn.”
“Not as much as I overcooked mine,” Greenwald said, cheerfully.
“Oh, God,” Miranda said.
They talked about the day, in May, 2013, when Snowden, already in Hong Kong,
sent Greenwald some samples of the N.S.A. material he had obtained. This
included a presentation about PRISM, the then unknown program that facilitated
the collection of data from major American Internet companies. That day,
Greenwald and Miranda, stunned, talked for five hours. “We knew our lives would
change,” Miranda said. “We made a promise that the only thing that cannot
change is us.” (Greenwald has changed a little, Miranda told me: “He was pretty
big, but he became this monster.” He was referring to the size of his
reputation.) Later, Miranda showed me photographs that he took while sitting
with Beyoncé, Jay Z, and Jennifer Lopez at the Vanity Fair Oscar party in 2015,
after “Citizenfour” won the award for Best Documentary. “Jay Z was asking me to
sit in his lap,” he said. By then, Greenwald had gone back to their hotel. (“It
was suffocating, it was too much,” Greenwald told me.)
“Journalists don’t just get sources—journalists create sources,” Snowden told
me, speaking on a video line from Russia during the World Cup. (He had
established, he said, that in soccer each side has “a maximum of eleven
players.”) He recalled first noticing Greenwald during the Bush Administration;
he read the blog, and felt a sense of fraternity in their shared
disillusionment. “I signed up for the Iraq War when everyone else was
protesting it,” Snowden said. Greenwald struck him as unbeholden to official
sources, and unencumbered by “a fear of being taken to be unserious, or shrill,
if you go over the boundaries of polite conversation.” Over the years, Snowden
said, reading Greenwald “probably caused me to become more skeptical.”
In December, 2012, Snowden reached out to Greenwald, who had recently been
hired away from Salon by the Guardian. (As at Salon, and now at the Intercept,
Greenwald’s Guardian contract stipulated that, unless he requested an editor’s
guidance, his columns would be published directly to the Internet.) Snowden
e-mailed him, using a pseudonymous account, and encouraged him to set up
encryption that would allow them to communicate safely. Greenwald didn’t get
around to it. Snowden began to talk with Laura Poitras, and then with the
journalist Barton Gellman. In April, Greenwald and Snowden finally started an
encrypted conversation. Three days after opening the PRISM file, Greenwald flew
to New York, and from there, with Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, a Guardian
reporter, to Hong Kong. In the Mira Hotel’s lobby, “this fucking kid shows up,”
Greenwald recalled, laughing. “Honestly, my first reaction was ‘O.K., our
source is gay and this is, like, his lover. His little wispy young lover.’ ”
Snowden, for his part, was struck by the level of Greenwald’s attention: “He
had a consuming incandescence about this story. He was driven. Things weren’t
happening fast enough, there were always more questions. There was just a
carnivorous desperation to learn what was going on, and then to tell people
about it.”
They met on Monday, June 3rd, and by the end of the day Greenwald had drafted
his first Snowden story, about the N.S.A.’s access to Verizon phone records. On
Wednesday, Spencer Ackerman, in Washington, invited the White House and the
N.S.A. to respond. Ben Rhodes, who was then in the White House, recalled that
“it kind of hit us like a freight train.” In Hong Kong, Greenwald became
impatient with what he perceived to be unnecessary delays. It was a “very
simple” story, he said, based on a single document. Greenwald went on, “I was
taking sleeping pills and Xanax and every conceivable narcotic to sleep just a
little bit—but I couldn’t. I was filled with adrenaline and nerves.” He sent a
draft of his article to Betsy Reed, at the time the executive editor of The
Nation. “She got back to me thirty minutes later and said, ‘We’re happy to
publish this.’ ”
Miranda said, “I wouldn’t let him publish in The Nation.”
“It’s a step down,” Greenwald said.
“It’s a step down.”
Miranda recalled urging Greenwald to tell the Guardian that, if it didn’t
publish the story soon, “we’re going to put the documents on a Web site.” (He
added, “That’s when the idea of the Intercept was created, right there.”) The
Guardian published it that evening.
James Risen told me, “I think that Snowden, and that story, brought out the
best in Glenn.” Rhodes, disagreeing, said that, given Greenwald’s
“Chomsky-like” distrust of American power, “the core challenge here is trying
to understand to what extent this was a matter of whistle-blowing on behalf of
a public debate about transparency, and to what extent this was just about
undermining U.S. foreign policy.”
Greenwald later said that, in Hong Kong, he had worried that Snowden might slip
into China, thus creating the impression that he was an asset of Chinese
intelligence. Had Snowden actually been one, Greenwald said, it would not have
affected his reporting, but it would have changed his opinion of his source.
Moreover, he said, “what protected me legally was the popularity of the story,
and its popularity would certainly have been lessened if he’d been revealed as
a Chinese spy.”
But Greenwald said that he had not felt unnerved when Snowden eventually was
granted asylum in Russia. He accepted Snowden’s account: that, upon leaving
Hong Kong, his intention was to reach Latin America, but the plan was thwarted
by the revocation of his passport, leaving him unable to transfer flights in
Moscow. Snowden has said that, before arriving in Russia, he relinquished his
access to his material. Rhodes told me, “It’s impossible for me to believe that
the Russians haven’t debriefed him on multiple occasions.” When I asked
Greenwald if Snowden could have coöperated in ways other than giving up
documents, he said, “I can’t guarantee that he didn’t share information with
them.” But Snowden had told him that he hadn’t done so; Greenwald added, “In
all the time I talked to Snowden, I’ve never, ever known him to lie to me.”
He went on, “I think the reason Putin accepted Snowden in Russia is because he
just liked the idea of being the protector of human rights against the United
States. So, instead of the United States getting to say, ‘You, Russia, are
persecuting people who are political dissidents,’ Putin got to say, ‘We’re
giving him rights, because he’s going to be persecuted in the United States.’ ”
Trolling? “Yes, exactly.”
Snowden and Greenwald used to talk every day. Now a week or two can pass
without contact. Greenwald visited Snowden in the spring of 2014, and then
again this summer, when he appeared on a panel discussion in Moscow, broadcast
on RT, the Russia-backed English-language news network, and moderated by RT’s
editor-in-chief. Greenwald told the audience that, after Trump’s victory, “the
American political system needed an explanation about why something like that
could happen, and why they got it wrong.” One explanation, he said, was that
“it was this other foreign country over there that was to blame. And that’s a
major reason why fingers continue to be pointed at the Russian government.”
(When Greenwald was criticized online for appearing on RT, he claimed,
incorrectly, that the BBC is also “state-controlled.”) On Instagram, Greenwald
posted a photograph of Snowden eating an ice-cream cone. Snowden had told me,
“We’re not like buddy-buddy. There’s a distance. We don’t talk about our
personal lives. We don’t call every Wednesday and say, ‘Hey, you want to play
bingo online?’ ”
Greenwald is not naturally collegial. In Rio, on a conference call about his
Navratilova film, he faced gentle resistance to one of his ideas. Smiling, he
raised a middle finger to the phone, and then started exchanging back-channel
texts with someone else on the call. Afterward, he congratulated himself on his
restraint, saying, “People come into working with me assuming I’m this, like,
demanding, abrasive asshole, so I don’t want to play into that stereotype right
away. I want to wait at least a month.”
Greenwald co-founded the Intercept in 2013, with Poitras and Jeremy Scahill;
the funding came from Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. (The site paid
Greenwald half a million dollars in its first year.) Greenwald does sometimes
consult with an editor before posting, but there have been times when Reed has
regretted that he did not. And it’s clear that there’s a category of Greenwald
article for which there’s limited appetite in New York. Reminded about a
fifteen-hundred-word article, in January, animated by the fact that Neera
Tanden—the president of the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think
tank—had retweeted a foolish remark about Chelsea Manning, Reed smiled, in a
“tell me about it” way.
In the Trump era, Greenwald seems to be most energized when he discovers flaws
in Democratic messaging, or in the output of an MSNBC contributor; this summer,
he wrote a piece about a single uncorrected error by Malcolm Nance, a former
intelligence officer, who had mistakenly said that Jill Stein had a show on RT;
Greenwald used the words “lie,” “fabrication,” and “falsehood,” and their
variants, twenty times, and proposed that “NBC News and MSNBC have essentially
merged with the C.I.A. and intelligence community,” and that “anyone who
criticizes the Democratic Party or its leaders is instantly accused of being a
Kremlin agent.”
Some of Greenwald’s admirers seem to register only the fighting spirit, and not
the actual claims, in this kind of writing. Dan Froomkin, who until last year
was the Washington editor of the Intercept, told me that, after someone had
criticized this article on Facebook, he had replied, “Do you dispute the
accuracy of a single thing Glenn wrote?” When I asked Froomkin about the claim
of an MSNBC/C.I.A. merger, he laughed, and said, “Oh, God, did he really say
that?,” before defending it as hyperbole.
Some people at the Intercept have questioned Greenwald’s decision to appear on
Fox News. According to Reed, “It’s become so entirely an organ of not even just
the Republican Party but the Trump Administration, and it has no compunction
about spreading lies, so I think there are real questions about why anyone
would go on there.” Greenwald told me, “I don’t know why it’s O.K. to ally with
Bill Kristol but not Tucker Carlson.” I reminded him that he has mocked MSNBC
and CNN for giving Kristol airtime. “I think there’s a difference between
giving someone a platform—inviting Bill Kristol on—and my going and using
Tucker Carlson’s audience,” he said.
Greenwald’s position on Trump and Russia has come to define the Intercept:
recently, when I was in an elevator at the New York office, an employee made a
joke about the “Russian-funded” opulence of the premises. When the Intercept
hired Risen, last September, Greenwald suspected that the move was intended to
offset his Trump-Russia opinions. “People have denied it, but I disbelieve
those denials,” he told me. This skepticism seems to be well founded. Risen
told me that his focus on Trump and Russia was “to help change the perception”
of the site. (Reed, describing Risen’s hiring, said he needed reassurance that
Greenwald would have no editorial influence over him.) Greenwald said, “I don’t
think the majority of people who work at the Intercept—because they’re good
liberals—are supportive of my whole posture with regard to Trump and Russia.
That’s fine with me. If they want to get someone who sounds like David Gregory
to write at the Intercept, it doesn’t really take away from anything I’m
doing.” (He later said that this wasn’t a reference to Risen, whom he called a
journalistic hero.) Risen said of Greenwald, “He looks at stories and thinks,
What are the implications of this story for the political positions that I
hold? And I try to look at a story and say, ‘Is this a good story or not?’ ” He
added, “I consider him a friend. We have good conversations.”
Greenwald went on to describe his frustration with an Intercept story,
published last summer, that was based on an N.S.A. report leaked by Reality
Winner, an N.S.A. contractor. The article described an attempt by Russian
military intelligence to introduce malware into the computers of U.S. election
officials in 2016. In Greenwald’s view, the story was overblown: the N.S.A.
analysis included no underlying evidence. Before publication, Greenwald vetoed
a suggestion that Snowden be invited to examine the leaked material. “I said,
‘I think it’s not a very good idea to send a top-secret N.S.A. document that
purports to describe Russia to Russia.’ ” He laughed. “Not even I would look
very kindly on that, if I were in the Trump Justice Department.” He was also
dismayed, as many people were, that the Intercept had not properly disguised
the document before showing it to the government for verification, making it
easy for Winner to be identified as its leaker; she was arrested shortly before
publication. The Intercept apologized, and supported her legal defense. The
site “fucked up,” Greenwald said. He added that, if he didn’t work there, he
might be wondering aloud why nobody was fired. (On August 23rd, Winner was
sentenced to five years in prison.)
WikiLeaks offered ten thousand dollars for the name of whoever at the Intercept
was responsible for Winner’s exposure. Greenwald and Julian Assange had become
allies during the Bush Administration, but their relationship was disrupted in
2013, when Snowden chose not to work with WikiLeaks. And, after Greenwald was
exposed to Snowden and his trove, he became less supportive of the WikiLeaks
approach, which typically involves publishing data in bulk, without curating or
redaction. In our conversations, Greenwald noted that among the Podesta e-mails
published by WikiLeaks were remarks about a campaign worker’s serious
mental-health problems; publishing that, he said, was “grotesque and incredibly
immoral.”
I was told that Greenwald now speaks harshly about Assange in private, but in
our conversations he described a civil relationship that navigated around
“Julian being Julian.” Greenwald told me that he had three visits with Assange
late last year. And he framed the preëlection alliance between WikiLeaks and
the Trump campaign as a human response to extreme conditions. Assange was
understandably focussed on escaping from what he has defined as imprisonment,
in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and Trump could potentially help him.
Moreover, Greenwald said, Assange “likes to be a big player—that’s super
important to him—and if you’re releasing stuff and Donald Trump is talking
about it every day, that massively increases your importance.”
Greenwald has a daily tennis lesson. One afternoon in April, on a hotel’s
court, his coach asked him how he’d performed in a tournament the previous
weekend. Greenwald had been beaten thoroughly, despite intensive preparation.
He’d mentioned this defeat to me, which was at the hands of a “ridiculously
good” young man who had clearly entered the tournament at the wrong level. “I
didn’t want to complain, because I try not to inject lawyer-journalist energy
into my recreational activities,” Greenwald said, laughing. “But at the same
time I felt it was a bureaucratic injustice.” He had “only once” intentionally
served the ball, without a bounce, directly at his opponent.
After he played with the coach for twenty minutes, cursing, it began to rain. I
told Greenwald that, during his lesson, it had been reported that Sean Hannity
had been named as a client of Michael Cohen’s, and that Trump had blocked
sanctions against Russia that Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the United
Nations, had announced the previous day. In our conversations, Greenwald had
made much of Trump’s willingness, earlier that month, to apply sanctions
against twenty-four Russian oligarchs and officials. And he had tweeted that
“the Trump Administration has been more willing to confront Russia & defy Putin
than the previous president.”
He began to respond to this news while trying to get out of the hotel’s parking
lot. The machine wouldn’t accept his ticket. Looking at the barrier in front of
us, he said, “I’m so tempted to just ride through it, which is a fantasy of
mine, from childhood. Look at how weak that is—I could definitely break that.”
He added, “I want to do something violent.”
He moved a cone, and drove around.
Greenwald asked me: What was being suggested by those who found it significant
that Trump had undermined an expansion of U.S. sanctions? Even if nobody was
quite arguing, he said, “that Putin called Trump and said, ‘Hey, I’m about to
release the peepee tape unless you pull this back,’ ” it was surely implied.
But wasn’t it as likely, he went on, that “Trump, like Obama, simply believes
it makes more sense for the Russians and the Americans to coöperate?”
He seemed to be running parallel arguments: Trump was tough on Russia; Trump,
wisely, was not tough. Greenwald said, “You can punish them occasionally but
have an over-all philosophy—that over-all philosophy of ‘Let’s just get along
with the Russians’ has been turned into something treasonous.” He went on,
“Even if he has weird dealings with Russia, I still think it’s in everybody’s
interest not to teach an entire new generation of people, becoming interested
in politics for the first time, that the Russians are demons.” (Later, shortly
before the Helsinki meeting between Trump and Putin, Greenwald told “Democracy
Now!” that the meeting was an “excellent idea.” Risen wrote that Trump’s
decision to meet Putin alone was “at best reckless.”)
If, for many years, a writer has described his fears about the state of
America, does he find it galling when others make much of their sudden new
fear? Embedded in Greenwald’s hostility to Trump’s critics seems to be the
aggrieved question “What took you so long?”
“Yes, yes!” Greenwald said, emphatically, as he drove. Years after he began
writing critically about expanded Presidential powers, “all these powers are
now in the hands of Donald Trump,” he said. “He gets to start wars. So I do get
a sense that, O.K., people are going to finally understand that this model of
the American Presidency—this omnipotence, this lack of checks and balances—is
so dangerous. But the problem is they’re being told that the danger is endemic
to Trump, and not to this broader systemic abuse that’s been created. And
that’s why I’m so opposed to the attempt to depict Trump as the singular evil.
It’s not just partial or incomplete—it’s counterproductive, it’s deceitful.”
He was acknowledging an ideological incentive for minimizing criticism of the
President. “We all make choices in what we’re going to prioritize,” he said. “I
could go online and denounce Trump all day, and my life would be easier and
more relaxing.”
Greenwald, who didn’t vote in 2016, and who sees Bernie Sanders as the best
likely candidate for 2020, later told me that, compared with current
conditions, a Clinton Presidency would have been “better in some ways, and
worse in other ways.” He referred to the likelihood that Clinton would have
pursued military action in Syria. Trump’s election, he said, had energized
public debate about “what kind of country we should be.”
Greenwald took me to see a dog shelter that he and Miranda opened last year.
Staffed by homeless people, most of them gay or transgender, it’s in the garden
of a once grand house, now occupied by squatters, on a forested hillside. A
dozen abandoned cars surrounded a swimming pool half-filled with green water.
He talked with a colleague about how to defuse a conflict between two factions
of homeless people living on the property. A woman had announced that she
intended to kill an antagonist. “It’s a war,” Greenwald told me,
matter-of-factly. He lay on his back with a dog in his arms, and looked serene.
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