Jason Leopold is a senior investigative reporter on the Bloomberg News investigations team. Previously, he was a senior investigative reporter at BuzzFeed News and senior investigative reporter for VICE News.
Leopold is a recipient of the 2023 Gerald Loeb award for investigative reporting, a 2022 George Polk award for health reporting and he has twice been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting. He was honored as a finalist in 2021 as one of the lead reporters on the massive reporting project known as the FinCEN Files, an investigation by BuzzFeed News, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and 108 media partners around the world, based on an unprecedented cache of US Treasury Department documents Leopold obtained, that revealed how banks knowingly profit from corruption and how authorities around the world allow the dark economy to flourish. Leopold was also honored as a Pulitzer finalist in 2018 as part of the team that investigated a series of suspicious deaths in the UK & US that linked back to the Kremlin. In 2015, Leopold was nominated for a News & Documentary Emmy award for producing The Architect for VICE News, 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. He has testified before a congressional oversight committee about the shortcomings of FOIA and steps the government needed to take to improve the law.
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." Politico has also referred to Leopold as “perhaps the most prolific Freedom of Information requester.” In 2016, Leopold 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.