Eli Lake

Early life and education

Lake was born to a Jewish family and graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1994.

Career

Lake began as national security reporter at the New York Sun and as State Department correspondent for United Press International.

In March 2017, Lake reported, inaccurately, that an intelligence official had shown House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes intelligence reports that allegedly included inappropriate details about the Trump transition team's communications. Lake later acknowledged that Nunes had "misled" him and that the reports had in fact been given to Nunes by a White House staffer, raising questions about whether Nunes' investigation was truly independent of the White House.

In 2009, Lake reported extensively on Obama’s delicate discussions with Israel over its nuclear program. Later that year, Lake’s reporting also helped to scuttle the nomination of Chas Freeman be the chairman of the National Intelligence Council.

In 2011 at Newsweek/The Daily Beast, Lake broke an exclusive report on how the Obama administration sold Israel powerful bunker buster bombs.

In 2012, reporting from Somalia, Lake found a local prison that received Somalis captured by the U.S. Navy and later disclosed how the United Nations documented U.S. violations of an arms embargo in Somalia to funding some of the regional governments there.

Lake was one of the first reporters to challenge the Obama administration’s initial claims in 2012 that the 9-11 anniversary attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi was not connected to al Qaeda. His reporting earned praise from both Eliana Johnson and Jeremy Scahill.

In 2013, Lake disclosed how court documents in the U.S. government challenge to Blackwater showed that the organization was an extension of the CIA after 9-11.

He was a contributing editor for The New Republic between 2008 and 2013. Lake joined The Daily Beast following The New Republic as Senior National Security Correspondent. Lake along with his colleague Josh Rogin left The Daily Beast in October 2014 and joined Bloomberg View.

In 2012 Lake reported for The Washington Times on Trita Parsi and his organization NIAC’s efforts to lobby the U.S. government to ease sanctions on Iran and prevent Dennis Ross from overseeing the US Government's Iran policy. Andrew Sullivan followed up that the documents leaked to Lake for the article suggested the motive of the story was to "smear" Parsi’s reputation.

Ken Silverstein, one of Lake's primary critics, has claimed his past sources lacked credibility and have been used to manipulate the discourse on national security. Silverstein accused Lake’s reporting of supporting WMDs prior to the invasion of Iraq. Silverstein cited an article that Lake had written in 2006 during the war in Iraq. In this article Lake reported that a Pentagon Special Investigator named David Gaubatz had been led to sealed storage facilities of chemical and biological weapons. Gaubatz reported his findings but the military failed to follow-up. Eight years later The New York Times reported on these aging stockpiles of chemical weapons and how they were never destroyed and posed risks to the soldier’s involved with storing the hazardous materials. Furthermore, Lake’s reporting on U.S. intelligence prior to the Iraqi invasion was one of the first major pieces of journalism to highlight the CIA’s concerns with intelligence gathered by the Pentagon and Iraqi opposition figure, Ahmad Chalabi.

In August of 2013 Lake, along with Josh Rogin, reported on a CIA intercept that claimed that Al Qaeda had a meeting of senior leaders in the form of a conference call. Silverstein criticized their work as misreporting for using the term "conference call" when a later article clarified the call as a remote meeting via internet video, voice conference and chat. Speculation about to the differences in the initial reports ranged from glorification of the NSA's abilities to protection of sources within the U.S. intelligence community.

In 2011 Silverstein wrote an article for Salon claiming that Lake's reporting on Georgia was biased because pro-Georgian lobbyists had paid for his meals and drinks in the past. This report was widely derided by journalists on Twitter and rebutted by Ben Smith on Politico. Silverstein implies that Lake’s relationship with these lobbyists influenced his original report of a bomb blast near the U.S. Embassy in Tblisi. That story was confirmed by The New York Times. Both pieces come to the same conclusion that a Russian military intelligence officer was implicated by Georgian and U.S. authorities in the bombing. Lake has publicly stated he has always paid his tab whenever meeting with Georgian sources.

Regarding U.S. attempts to try Wikileaks head Julian Assange under the Espionage Act of 1917, Lake has said: "I oppose the application of the espionage statute to Assange because the same kind of prosecution would make me a criminal too."

In 2013, he wrote an article for The Daily Beast about how to respond to haters on Twitter and social media, by telling them how he loves their passion.