The Adversarial Journalist

Five years after he broke the Edward Snowden story, reporter Glenn Greenwald is speaking truth to power again — whether you want to hear it or not

- John Meroney

Just before President Donald J. Trump met with Russian president Vladimir Putin in Helsinki in July, Glenn Greenwald flew to Moscow. The investigative journalist and former lawyer, in town to participate in a cybersecurity conference, was on his own audacious mission: to challenge the Trump-era tendency among politicians and mainstream media outlets to characterize anyone who engages with Russians — let alone visits the country — as suspicious, if not downright treacherous.

“The panel itself didn’t generate controversy,” says Greenwald, speaking from his adoptive home of Rio de Janeiro. (In this context at least, he projects unflappable calm whether he’s talking about tennis or Trump.) “That started afterward, when I gave an interview to RT,” Russia’s 24-hour Englishlanguage news channel. Greenwald told RT that Americans on both sides of the political spectrum are obsessed with “viewing Russia not just as an adversary but as an actual enemy.” He added: “There’s actually talk a lot now about how what they regard as the interference in the 2016 election is similar to Pearl Harbor…or Al Qaeda and 9/11.” Greenwald continued: “Despite all the claims that… Trump is a puppet of Russia, in many ways Obama was more cooperative with the Russian government than Trump was.”

On the same trip, Greenwald met with Edward Snowden, the former CIA analyst and NSA contractor who leaked top-secret documents exposing mass surveillance of U.S. citizens — and whose whistle-blowing Greenwald helped facilitate via The Guardian, launching both men onto the global stage. Greenwald posted multiple smiling selfies of the two on Instagram.