With his book entitled No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the U.S. Surveillance State set for release on Tuesday, the GQ website posted an extensive interview with radical-left reporter Glenn Greenwald in which he covers a wide range of topics, ranging from his continuing friendship with Snowden to his strong distaste for the presumptive Democratic candidate in the upcoming 2016 presidential election.
Hillary Clinton is “banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion,” he told interviewer Michael Paterniti in a move that is bound to diminish his stature among liberal Democrats. However, Greenwald admitted, the "f**king hawk" is going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy.”
The 47-year-old openly homosexual reporter's passionate declaration came after he was asked what he thinks of all the “early presidential jockeying” for 2016. Greenwald then asserted:
She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But … opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist.
It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing.
Nevertheless, “I hope this happens so badly because I think it’ll be so instructive in that regard,” he noted. “It’ll prove the point” that “Americans love to mock the idea of monarchy, and yet we have our own de facto monarchy.”
Returning to the release of tens of thousands of classified documents, Greenwald asserted: “I think what these leaks did is they demonstrated that there really is this government that just is the kind of permanent government that doesn’t get affected by election choices, and that isn’t in any way accountable to any sort of democratic transparency and just creates its own world off on its own.”
As NewsBusters previously reported, in late 2012, a person calling himself Cincinnatus reached out via e-mail with the urgent desire to reveal some top-secret documents. “As a blogger, author, and relentless commentator on all things related to the NSA, Greenwald had been here before. He figured it was a setup, or nut job, and disregarded the message.”
The source then contacted Greenwald's friend, Laura Poitras -- an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker -- and sent along a sample of the encrypted documents. Poitras got in touch with Greenwald immediately.
“I first started talking to Snowden sitting right at this table, by chat on the computer,” the reporter explained. “I just kept insisting that he send me some sampling of what he had. So he sent me two dozen extraordinary documents.
“And I remember, I mean, I literally just physiologically couldn’t breathe. As I was reading them, I had to keep stopping and running around the house and telling [his partner] David what I had. I was half celebrating but half freaking out because I started, for the first time, to realize the potential of what this was,” Greenwald continued.
When Greenwald first met Snowden, "I thought he would be a 60-year-old senior NSA guy, and then here's this pale, stringbeany kid with glasses,” the 29-year-old National Security Agency contractor who gave him a vast amount of documents, the majority of which were labeled “Top Secret.”
However, the reporter soon clashed over the release of the documents with Bill Keller, former executive editor of the New York Times, whom Greenwald accused of neutering journalism “as a potent force for checking power, and the kind of journalism that I think we intend to do.”
Regarding the future release of further documents, the reporter stated:
I think we will end the big stories in about three months or so [June or July of 2014]. I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last.
There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.
“Afterwards, there’ll be more to release -- I made a promise to Snowden that we’d get as much of the archive out as possible -- but I think the big media splashes will probably be over,” he said.
Judging from his frank remarks about Hillary Clinton, Greenwald probably won't be invited to many events during the 2016 presidential election. Hopefully, he'll be satisfied with the fireworks he set off by exposing secrets during a liberal Democrat's tenure in the White House.
