The Bob Graham Center for Public Service provides a wide variety of programs for students and the larger public on topics related to public service, public leadership and civic engagement.
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Brechner Speaker Series: Investigative Reporter Jason Leopold
October 20, 2022 @ 6:00 pm - 7:00 pm
The Brechner Center Speaker Series, a bi-annual series open to the public, features journalists and newsmakers who talk about their experiences with government secrecy and the pitfalls of too much privacy.
On Thursday, Oct. 20, at 6 pm in the Pugh Hall Ocora, the Brechner Center hosted the first in this year’s Brechner Series — award-winning journalist Jason Leopold, who has been called “the most active individual FOIA litigator in the United States today.”
Leopold is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg News, perhaps best known as the journalist who filed the Freedom of Information Act request that spurred the State Department to release all 52,000 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails. He has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting and was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy Award for producing the first-ever interview with retired Air Force psychologist James Mitchell, the man credited with developing the CIA’s torture program whose story Leopold had pursued for a decade.
Leopold’s Freedom of Information Act work has been profiled by dozens of radio, television and print outlets, including a 2015 front-page story in the New York Times. In 2016, he was awarded the FOI Award from Investigative Reporters & Editors and was inducted into the National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame by the Freedom Forum Institute and the Newseum. In 2020, The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data research organization out of Syracuse University, identified Leopold as “the most active individual FOIA litigator in the United States today.”
The series platform was Q&A style and moderated by Sara Ganim, the Brechner Center’s journalist in residence. Ganim won a Pulitzer Prize at age 24 for breaking and covering the investigation into former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky’s sexual abuse of young boys.
A recording of the event is available at: https://mediasite.video.ufl.edu/Mediasite/Play/bcb5310e466a4d6ca7767c63091472a41d