Glenn Greenwald

Glenn Greenwald
Born	1967 New York City, NY
Occupation	Author, columnist, blogger, and former constitutional law attorney
Nationality	American
Website
www.salon.com

Glenn Greenwald (born 1967 in New York City) is an American attorney, best-selling author of How Would a Patriot Act? and A Tragic Legacy, political and legal blogger, and columnist at Salon Magazine. While Greenwald describes himself as neither liberal nor conservative, he has frequently criticized the policies of the George W. Bush administration and conservatives who support it, claiming that "Bush followers are not conservatives".

Background

Greenwald is a graduate of George Washington University and received a J.D. from New York University Law School. He worked at the New York law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz both before and briefly after he joined the New York bar in 1995. He left to co-found the law firm of Greenwald Christoph & Holland, now Greenwald Christoph, where he litigated cases concerning constitutional issues.

One of Greenwald's more notable First Amendment clients was neo-Nazi Matthew Hale. Hale was eventually jailed and tried for solicitation of murder against Joan Lefkow, who had been the federal judge in the trademark case. Although Greenwald was not involved in his criminal defense, between Hale's conviction and sentencing, Hale attempted to use Greenwald to convey a coded message, but Greenwald refused. At the time, Hale was suspected of complicity in the recent double murder of Lefkow's husband and mother, but he was eventually cleared. He remains jailed for the earlier conviction.

Greenwald is openly gay and splits his time between Brazil and New York City. He explains that this is because Brazil recognizes his same-sex relationship with his Brazilian partner, while the United States does not.

Unclaimed Territory and Salon.com

Greenwald started a blog, "Unclaimed Territory", in October 2005, focusing initially on the Valerie Plame affair and the investigation of Scooter Libby. When the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy became known two months later, he shifted primary attention to that. He quickly became known as a prominent legal critic of the George W. Bush administration. He has written in American Conservative magazine and appeared as a guest on C-SPAN's Washington Journal, Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, Air America's "Rachel Maddow Show" and Majority Report and Public Radio International's To the Point. His reporting and analysis have been cited in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and several Congressional reports on executive power. In April 2006, he was given a 2005 Koufax Award for Best New Blog.

Greenwald attracted national media attention in January 2006 when he announced on his blog his finding that U.S. Senator Mike DeWine had proposed an easier standard for domestic eavesdropping by federal agents in 2002, but the administration had declined any interest in the legislation and advised him that it would probably be unconstitutional, a direct contradiction of much of the later rationale for the NSA warrantless domestic spying program once it was known. This discovery became widely covered by the national media, which often credited Greenwald for breaking the story. For example, The Washington Post reported:

The Bush administration rejected a 2002 Senate proposal that would have made it easier for FBI agents to obtain surveillance warrants in terrorism cases, concluding that the system was working well and that it would likely be unconstitutional to lower the legal standard. ...

Democrats and national security law experts who oppose the NSA program say the Justice Department's opposition to the DeWine legislation seriously undermines arguments by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and others, who have said the NSA spying is constitutional and that surveillance warrants are often too cumbersome to obtain.

"It's entirely inconsistent with their current position," said Philip B. Heymann, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration who teaches law at Harvard University. "The only reason to do what they've been doing is because they wanted a lower standard than 'probable cause.' A member of Congress offered that to them, but they turned it down." ...

The DeWine amendment — first highlighted this week by Internet blogger Glenn Greenwald and widely publicized yesterday by the Project on Government Secrecy, an arm of the Federation of American Scientists — is the latest point of contention in a fierce political and legal battle over the NSA monitoring program.'

U.S. Senator Russ Feingold quoted Greenwald's blog on the floor of the Senate when he introduced Senate Resolution 398, to censure President Bush.

On February 1, 2007, Greenwald announced that he was moving his blog to Salon Magazine, where he would also be a contributing writer. In his last post at Unclaimed Territory dated February 12, 2007, Greenwald directed his readers to Salon Magazine. In his posts at Salon, he has touched many of the same themes as in Unclaimed Territory, giving particular focus to cases he claims show that the media fail to challenge administration claims for reasons of bias or laziness.

In his Salon column[1] Greenwald disputed a Time Magazine column written by Joe Klein. Time initially published a subsequent comment as follows: "In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don't." Greenwald noted that the text of the legislation does not require court review of individual targets, and Time's response, only repeating "what each side says," disregarded this fact.

Books

Greenwald wrote the New York Times best selling, book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok. Pre-orders placed the book at #1 on Amazon.com in less than 24 hours, where it stayed for several days.

Greenwald's second book, A Tragic Legacy, is according to Greenwald "an examination of Bush's presidency with an emphasis on his personality traits and beliefs that drove the presidency (along with an emphasis on how and why those personality traits have led to a presidency that has failed to historic proportions)". A Tragic Legacy was released on June 26, 2007, debuted on The New York Times Best Seller list, and was the #1 book on Amazon's Non-Fiction Best Seller List . Alan Colmes of Fox News described "A Tragic Legacy" as "the best book about the worst president. Glenn Greenwald is to this administration as they've been to the country: devastating"

In September 2007, Greenwald announced on his blog that he was working on his third book, to be published by Random House and released in April 2008, and asked readers to submit suggestions for the title. Greenwald said the book would examine "the gap between the Mythological Right-Wing Male Leader and the reality of their actual leaders" by "highlighting the manipulative cultural themes the right-wing has wielded to win elections."

External links

• Glenn Greenwald Column at Salon
• Unclaimed Territory Greenwald's old blog; no longer updated since the Salon column.
• Video - Greenwald debates University of Virginia law professor Robert Turner on C-SPAN, February 2006
• Video - Greenwald speaks at YearlyKos 2007
• Video - Greenwald speaks at The Cato Institute
• Interview - CAP Campus interview with Greenwald