Eli Lake | |
|---|---|
 Eli Lake in 2009 | |
| Born | Eli Jon Lake Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Occupation | Journalist |
Eli Jon Lake is an American journalist, podcaster, former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, and former columnist for the Bloomberg View.[1][2] He has also contributed to CNN,[3] Fox,[4] C-SPAN,[5] Charlie Rose,[6] the I Am Rapaport: Stereo Podcast[7] and Bloggingheads.tv.[8]
Lake was born in Philadelphia[9] to a Jewish family[10] and graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1994.[11]
Lake began as national security reporter at the New York Sun[12] and as State Department correspondent for United Press International (UPI).[13] He was a contributing editor for The New Republic between 2008 and 2013.[14][15] Lake joined The Daily Beast following The New Republic as Senior National Security Correspondent.[16] Lake along with his colleague Josh Rogin left The Daily Beast in October 2014 and joined Bloomberg View, where his last published column was about American foreign policy with Iran[2][17]
Ken Silverstein, one of Lake's primary critics, has claimed his past sources lacked credibility and been used to manipulate the discourse on national security. Silverstein accused Lake's reporting of supporting the existence of WMDs prior to the invasion of Iraq. Silverstein cited an article that Lake had written in 2006 during the war in Iraq.[18]
In 2011 at The Daily Beast, Lake reported that the Obama administration sold Israel powerful bunker buster bombs.[19] In 2012, reporting from Somalia, Lake found a local prison that received Somalis captured by the U.S. Navy and later reported that the United Nations documented U.S. violations of an arms embargo in Somalia to funding some of the regional governments there.[20][21][22]
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.[23] This report was disputed by Ben Smith in Politico.[24] Silverstein implied that Lake's relationship with these lobbyists influenced his original report of a bomb blast near the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi. 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.[25][26] Lake has publicly stated he has always paid his tab whenever meeting with Georgian sources.[importance?][23]
In August 2013, along with Josh Rogin, Lake 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.[27]
In March 2017, Lake quoted House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes saying that an intelligence officer had shown him 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.[28]
Lake's podcast, "The Re-Education with Eli Lake," debuted on April 21, 2022 with an episode titled "The War on Comedy."