Jason Leopold is co-founder of The Public Record, and author of the book, News Junkie, which has been optioned by a Hollywood production company. Leopold was most recently senior editor for the online news magazine, Truthout.org.
He has worked as the Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire and as a city editor and reporter for the Los Angeles Times. He is a two-time winner of a Project Censored award for his investigative work on Halliburton and Enron, and is featured in the 2005 and 2007 editions of Censored: The News that Didn’t Make the News.
In March 2008, he was awarded the Thomas Jefferson award by The Military Religious Freedom Foundation for a series of stories on the rise of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. Military.
He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron’s downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron President Jeffrey Skilling following Enron’s bankruptcy filing in December 2001. He was a consultant on the Enron documentary, “The Smartest Guys in the Room.” His reporting has been cited in more than forty books.
Leopold’s work has been published in The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, Salon, The Wall Street Journal, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Financial Times, Alternet, Z Magazine, Earth Island Journal, Homeland Security Today, and numerous other national and international publications. Leopold has interviewed on more than 200 radio stations discussing politics and the state of mainstream American journalism.
He appears weekly on KRXA radio in Monterey and is the U.S correspondent for 95bFM in Auckland, New Zealand. He has also appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two-dozen energy industry conferences around the country. He regularly is invited to speak to college students across the country about ethics in journalism and investigative reporting.
Leopold reported in May 2006, citing unnamed sources, that special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald had secured an indictment against former White House official Karl Rove for his involvement in the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. The story set off a firestorm of criticism against Leopold on the Internet and led the Washington Post to publish several reports about Leopold's past issues with substance abuse, his ethics as a journalist, and the reliability of his reports. In June 2006, Rove's attorney said Fitzgerald provided him with a letter "clearing" Rove of wrongdoing. The letter has never been released publicly.
He can be contacted via email: jasonleopold@pubrecord.org
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