The Secret to Getting Top-Secret Secrets

How a journalist with a dark past learned to pry info from the government—and redeemed himself in the process

By Jason Fagone
Illustrations by Kristian Hammerstad
Photographs by Chris McPherson

Jason Leopold tells me to pull up a chair in his home office. It’s a weekday morning in March, and he’s working out of his clean, quiet two-bedroom house in Beverly Hills. The office, next to the kitchen, feels like some kind of resonating chamber for his mania, a tiny room with a window that looks out onto a twisty canyon road. A poster of I.F. Stone, the independent journalist and muckraker, hangs on the wall, along with a small, framed piece of paper that Leopold recently found sitting on a table at the U.S. military base in Guantánamo Bay. It’s one of his favorite document scores ever: a “Public Affairs Smart Card” created for the military’s PR folks, telling them to “Own the Interview” and “Stay in your Lane” and listing the many topics they’re not allowed to discuss, including “Investigations or their Results,” “Suicide,” “Construction,” “Presidential Remarks,” and “Attorney Allegations.” (To Leopold, this one scrap of paper made the whole trip worthwhile because it revealed how the government tries to control information. “I’m like, you idiots, why did you leave that lying around?”) And everywhere, stacked on bookshelves and on his desk, are piles of paper from every imaginable government agency, state and federal, topped by response letters: Dear Mr. Leopold… Dear Mr. Leopold…

I first learned about Leopold’s work from Twitter. His profile picture showed him standing in front of the entrance to Guantánamo wearing a T-shirt from the punk band Black Flag. He called himself a “FOIA…