This is an email I never thought I'd be sending

Some personal and professional news

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This is not an email I thought I’d ever be sending you. After about a decade as Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post, I took that same role in 2017 at The Intercept. I genuinely thought that was the last job switch of my career, and that I’d be leaving The Intercept in a box. The job was just too perfect.

Today is another reminder that nothing is permanent and nothing is perfect. And that’s ok: I’m leaving along with my longtime colleague Jeremy Scahill, and we’re launching something new together. You’re reading it right now. It’s called Drop Site, and we’d love to have your support.

It’s wild to think that many of you reading this email today have been subscribed to it since before I even joined The Intercept, back when I used to call it “Bad News.” (Why I didn’t go with the obvious “Grim News” remains a mystery, even to me.)

The why of why I’m leaving is a dramatic story probably much more interesting to me than anybody else, and there’ll be a time for telling that. But what’s important is that we plan to carry on the legacy of The Intercept’s investigative journalism at a time when it’s desperately needed.

Jeremy Scahill and I, along with other veterans of The Intercept, have a serious plan to make this work in a sustainable way, but we need your support. Please consider becoming a paying subscriber. Our reporting will always be free to the public, but your subscription makes it possible. It’ll also give you early access to podcasts, live and virtual events, AMAs, our comment section, etc. 

As Politico reported this morning, we’ll be posting an exclusive interview later today with Democratic money man Dmitri Mehlhorn, a major power broker who remains a steadfast defender of Biden staying in the race. We’ll have other stories rolling out throughout the week you won’t want to miss.

If a monthly commitment is too much for now, consider making a one-time contribution. Contributions to Drop Site are tax-deductible and if you’d like more information regarding a larger gift, write to majorgiving@dropsitenews.com.

Jeremy will be sending out a note later today, look out for that in your inbox.

We’re being joined at Drop Site by The Intercept’s former deputy editor, Nausicaa Renner, who quit from The Intercept in protest in February — and we’ll have more announcements to come in the days ahead. Nausicaa worked closely with us on our coverage of everything from D.C. to Gaza, and she’ll be the founding editor at Drop Site. 

We’re getting the band back together, and we’re going to have a laser focus on big stories. The HuffPost era of digital media, when we had to churn out clicky hot takes, is mercifully over. That’s lucky for me: I can do the hot takes if I need to, but it’s not where my heart is. I’m most alive while chasing a lead on a potentially explosive story, preferably the kind of story the rest of the media is afraid to get too close to. Those are the investigations that make a real difference in the world. It’s expensive work but with your help we can keep doing it.

Because Jeremy and I have long focused on investigative journalism rather than pure opinion—even though we don’t hide what we think—we’re among the few journalists left whose work is taken seriously across the political spectrum. And during the last administration, we exposed some of Donald Trump’s most egregious abuses—with some articles leading to resignations and criminal prosecutions—while much of the media was focused on his bad manners and other trivia. We might not need to do that again, depending on how the election goes, but if we do, we’ll be ready.

We’ll also continue exposing the gap between what Trump tells his supporters he plans to do, and what he actually does with power—and who that benefits. At the same time, Democratic elites can’t be allowed to hide behind the specter of Trump to avoid scrutiny. Back in 2019, you might remember, I kicked off a several-days-long scandal with a story that quoted Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s spokesman saying, “The greatest threat to mankind is the cowardice of the Democratic Party.” He was later fired, but the warning was prescient. Our aim is to keep them on guard and stiffen their spines. Look what just happened in France: the center collapsed, but it was the left that gave voters the hope and courage to beat back the far right.

What we’ve also learned over the years is that timed and targeted investigative journalism can have major impact abroad – and virtually nobody else is doing it, certainly not doing it the way we are. In recent years, we exposed a coup plot by a Bolivian minister of defense that led to his indictment and, after he fled, to efforts to extradite him. The Intercept Brasil’s reporting on the corrupt prosecution of Lula da Silva helped free him and return him to the presidency. In the face of furious State Department denials, we obtained documentary evidence proving the U.S. role in ousting Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan from power. We published never-before-seen evidence of India’s foreign ministry plotting assassinations on U.S. soil. And we’ve been unafraid to take on the MSM lies and propaganda fueling Israel’s mass slaughter of Palestinians. As Israel turns northward toward war with Lebanon, we’re positioned to be a critical source on that conflict, too.

Please forward this email to anybody you think might be interested.

If they’re not familiar with our work, here’s a quick thumbnail sketch of us both: Jeremy Scahill has reported from war and conflict zones around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia. He is the author of the international best-selling books Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army and Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield. He has won some of the top prizes in journalism, including two George Polk Awards and an Oscar nomination for the documentary version of Dirty Wars. He co-founded The Intercept in 2013. 

I’ve been doing investigative journalism for about two decades and joined The Intercept in 2017. Before that, I was a reporter for Washington City Paper, the local alt-weekly, then Politico in its early days, and then was Washington bureau chief for The Huffington Post when it was taking some really big swings. We won a Pulitzer in 2012 for our investigation into the lives of veterans returning from combat and won a Polk Award for an investigation into opioid treatment industry in 2016. That story was also a finalist for a Pulitzer. 

I mention these credentials not to brag—okay, it’s partly to brag—but because they matter when it comes to establishment Washington. We are among the few journalists in the country who have those kinds of credentials and are also willing to report on uncomfortable and difficult topics that make powerful people very angry. It’s not that we’re better than other independent journalists out there, but because of our track record in journalism, our work gets read and listened to in the corridors of power. We can’t be easily ignored. 

It’s also important that we report for an institution. Even though trust in institutions is at an all-time low, the fact that we were able to build The Intercept into a force that had to be reckoned with gave our work greater punch. It would certainly be more personally lucrative for us to go off and write individual Substacks, but building a full-fledged news outlet is required if we want to punch above our weight. That’s what we did with The Intercept, and that’s what we’ll do at Drop Site. And that’s why your support is so important. 

We know we’re a little crazy to do this. We’re starting Drop Site News just days after leaving The Intercept. But news doesn’t slow down, and neither can we. Plus, we’ve always been a little scrappy, and we’re grateful to you for following along wherever we go.