Jason Leopold

Career & FOIA Mastery

Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter at Bloomberg News, with a career spanning three decades of breaking institutional secrecy through FOIA litigation. Since 1992, he has filed over 13,000 public records requests—by far the most active individual FOIA litigator in the United States. Politico calls him "perhaps the most prolific Freedom of Information requester," while the FBI branded him a "FOIA terrorist" and the NSA claimed he "weaponized" the law. Leopold forced the release of Hillary Clinton's emails, the Secret Service's threat assessments of celebrities, and countless other sensitive government records.

Disclosure Era & UAP Coverage

As an investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News and The Intercept, Leopold covered the explosive disclosure-era UAP revelations beginning in 2023, including the David Grusch whistleblower testimony and subsequent government UAP programs. His work exemplifies how institutional secrecy around non-human intelligence claims crumbles under sustained FOIA pressure and investigative scrutiny. Leopold's role as a disclosure-era intermediary—translating leaked documents and whistleblower claims into public accountability—has been essential to the transparency movement.

Awards & Recognition

Leopold's contributions have been widely recognized: he won the 2026 Brechner Freedom of Information Award (cited for "tenacity and passion in acquiring public records"), the 2023 Gerald Loeb Award for investigative reporting, the 2022 George Polk Award for health reporting, and was inducted into the National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame by the Newseum Institute in 2016. He has been nominated for Emmy awards and was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His investigative team won recognition from the American Journalist Association for exposing government agency resistance to transparency requests.