The Intercept Promised to Reveal Everything. Then Its Own Scandal Hit.

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All the drama would make this another colorful story about extreme newsroom dysfunction had The Intercept not caught the attention of a naïve National Security Agency linguist with the improbable name of Reality Winner in 2017. Ms. Winner, then 25, had been listening to the site’s podcast. She printed out a secret report on Russian cyberattacks on American voting software that seemed to address some of Mr. Greenwald’s doubts about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and mailed it to The Intercept’s Washington, D.C., post office box in early May.

The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained a crease showing it had been printed out, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker.

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Ms. Winner may have thought she was mailing the documents to Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras, who went to great lengths to protect Mr. Snowden. But Mr. Greenwald was in Brazil and when he heard about the document, he was not interested. He told me that he considered its claims about Russian hacking during the 2016 race “wildly overblown” and that it didn’t include direct evidence to persuade him otherwise.

Ms. Poitras, meanwhile, had at that point left The Intercept, and gone on to establish a nonprofit production firm, Field of Vision, a part of First Look Media, which also includes The Intercept and Mr. Omidyar’s other ventures.

New York Times
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-intercept-source-reality-winner.amp.html