Michael Isikoff

Based on Wikipedia: Michael Isikoff

The Reporter Who Almost Broke the Biggest Scandal of the 1990s

Michael Isikoff had the story. He had the sources, the facts, the confirmation. The Clinton-Lewinsky scandal—the affair between President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky that would consume American politics for years—was ready to go to print. And then, just hours before publication, Newsweek killed it.

The next morning, Matt Drudge broke the story on his website, the Drudge Report. Isikoff had been scooped on his own scoop.

This near-miss tells you something essential about investigative journalism: it's not just about finding the story, it's about getting it past the gatekeepers. And Isikoff has spent his entire career navigating that treacherous space between uncovering truth and getting permission to share it.

From Long Island to Washington's Inner Circles

Born in 1952 to a Jewish family in Syosset, New York—a suburb on Long Island about an hour east of Manhattan—Isikoff followed a path familiar to many ambitious journalists of his generation. He graduated from the local high school in 1970, then headed to Washington University in St. Louis for his undergraduate degree, with a year abroad at Durham University in England. He capped his education with a master's degree from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, one of the most prestigious journalism programs in the country.

His first job, while still in graduate school, paid a hundred dollars a week at the Alton Telegraph, a small newspaper in Illinois. It wasn't glamorous. But it was real reporting, and it taught him the fundamentals that would serve him for decades.

By 1978, he had made it to Washington, working for the States News Service, where he covered stories with an Illinois angle. The nation's capital would become his professional home for the rest of his career.

The Newsweek Years: From the War on Terror to Abu Ghraib

Isikoff joined Newsweek as an investigative correspondent in June 1994, and the timing couldn't have been more consequential. He would be there for some of the most turbulent years in modern American history.

After the September 11th attacks in 2001, Isikoff became part of the Newsweek team that won the Overseas Press Club's most prestigious honor—the Ed Cunningham Memorial Award for best magazine reporting from abroad—for their coverage of what the George W. Bush administration called the "war on terror." He wrote extensively about the Abu Ghraib scandal, where American military personnel tortured and abused prisoners at a detention facility in Iraq. Those photographs of hooded prisoners, stacked in human pyramids, being menaced by dogs—they became some of the most damaging images of the entire Iraq War.

But Isikoff's most controversial Newsweek moment came in May 2005, with a story about Guantanamo Bay.

The Quran Story That Sparked Deadly Riots

In the May 9th issue, Isikoff co-wrote an article claiming that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility in Cuba had flushed a Quran—the holy book of Islam—down a toilet in an attempt to psychologically pressure Muslim detainees. Prisoners had made similar complaints before, but this was the first time a government source appeared to confirm it.

The reaction was explosive. Across the Islamic world, particularly in Afghanistan, massive protests erupted. People died—at least seventeen, according to reports. The American government faced a public relations catastrophe at a moment when it was trying to win hearts and minds in Muslim-majority countries.

Newsweek eventually retracted the story after their anonymous source couldn't remember key details. Critics accused the magazine of recklessness, of publishing inflammatory material without adequate verification.

But here's the complicating factor: a Pentagon report released about a month later confirmed that there had indeed been multiple instances of Quran desecration at Guantanamo. In one incident, a guard's urine came through an air vent and splashed on a detainee and his Quran. The specific toilet-flushing detail may have been wrong or unverifiable, but the broader pattern of disrespect toward the religious practices of Muslim prisoners was real.

This is the murky territory investigative journalists navigate constantly. When is a story ready? When do you trust a source? What happens when you get the big picture right but a specific detail wrong?

The Clinton Dress That Never Was

Speaking of murky territory: in 2018, Isikoff revealed a remarkable story from the Clinton-Lewinsky era. Linda Tripp—the coworker who secretly recorded Monica Lewinsky talking about her affair with the president—had allegedly offered to steal the infamous blue dress from Lewinsky's closet and hand it to Isikoff.

If you don't remember the blue dress, it became central to the scandal because it allegedly contained physical evidence—semen stains—that could prove a sexual encounter between Clinton and Lewinsky. This was before ubiquitous DNA testing, before the forensic sophistication we take for granted today.

According to Isikoff, he refused Tripp's offer. His reasoning was practical: he didn't want to possess stolen property, and even if he had the dress, he had no access to Bill Clinton's DNA to test it against. What would he even do with it?

The dress eventually made its way to independent counsel Kenneth Starr through other channels, and its DNA evidence became a crucial piece of the investigation that led to Clinton's impeachment by the House of Representatives. Isikoff had passed on what could have been one of the biggest scoops in political journalism history. Whether that was journalistic integrity or a missed opportunity depends on your view of what reporters owe their readers versus what they owe the law.

From Newsweek to NBC to Yahoo

Isikoff left Newsweek and joined NBC News in July 2010 as their national investigative correspondent. It seemed like a natural fit—a veteran print journalist making the transition to television, where investigative reporting was enjoying something of a renaissance.

But it didn't last. By April 2014, Isikoff resigned, telling people that NBC had moved in a direction that left him with "fewer opportunities" for his kind of work. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the network wanted different things than a deep-dive investigative reporter could provide. Television news increasingly favored quick-hit stories and personality-driven content over the slow, methodical work of digging into complex scandals.

He landed at Yahoo News, becoming their chief investigative correspondent. In the digital media landscape of the 2010s, this was actually a significant platform. Yahoo News had substantial traffic and was willing to invest in serious journalism.

Russia, Trump, and the FISA Controversy

In September 2016, Isikoff wrote an article for Yahoo News about Carter Page, a foreign policy advisor to Donald Trump's presidential campaign who was alleged to have connections to Russian authorities. This was during the heat of the election, when questions about Russian interference were swirling but hadn't yet become the dominant political story they would soon be.

What Isikoff didn't know—and couldn't have known at the time—was that his article would become entangled in one of the most contentious political fights of the Trump era.

Federal authorities cited Isikoff's article in their application for a FISA warrant—that's a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a secret court that approves surveillance of suspected foreign agents. They used his reporting as part of their justification for monitoring Carter Page.

This became a major controversy when Representative Devin Nunes, a California Republican and Trump ally, released a memo alleging that the FBI had improperly used Isikoff's article. According to Nunes, the FBI presented the article as independent corroboration for the so-called Steele Dossier—a collection of opposition research on Trump compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. But Isikoff's article was itself based in part on information from Steele. So the FBI was essentially using the same source twice, disguised as two separate pieces of evidence.

For Isikoff, this was an uncomfortable position. His journalism had become a weapon in a political battle he didn't control. The article itself was legitimate reporting based on sources he believed were credible. But its use by federal authorities raised questions about the relationship between journalism and law enforcement, between open-source reporting and secret surveillance applications.

Books on Russian Interference

Isikoff didn't shy away from the Russia story. In 2018, he and his frequent collaborator David Corn—Washington editor of Mother Jones magazine—published "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump." The book became a bestseller, offering a detailed account of how Russian intelligence services allegedly worked to influence the 2016 election.

This was Isikoff's third book with Corn. Their first collaboration, "Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War," published in 2006, had also been a New York Times bestseller. That book examined how the George W. Bush administration made the case for invading Iraq in 2003, focusing on the manipulation of intelligence and the ensuing Plame affair—a scandal involving the leak of a CIA officer's identity.

The CIA Plot to Kidnap Julian Assange

In 2021, Isikoff and his Yahoo News colleagues broke another remarkable story: the Central Intelligence Agency had developed plans to kidnap Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, had been living in the embassy since 2012, claiming asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault allegations—charges he denied and said were pretexts to eventually send him to the United States. The embassy became a kind of prison; Assange couldn't leave without being arrested by British authorities.

According to Isikoff's reporting, CIA officials under director Mike Pompeo developed plans to either kidnap Assange outright or engage in a firefight with Russian operatives if they tried to help him escape. The plan was reportedly never approved, but its very existence raised profound questions about the lengths to which American intelligence agencies would go to get their hands on someone who had embarrassed them by publishing classified documents.

This is the kind of story Isikoff has made his career on: the intersection of national security, government secrecy, and individual rights. It's never clean. It rarely has heroes. But it's essential for citizens to know.

Find Me the Votes: The 2024 Election Book

Isikoff's most recent book, published in 2024 with co-author Daniel Klaidman, is titled "Find Me the Votes." The phrase comes from a recorded phone call in which President Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes to overturn the 2020 election results in that state.

The book centers on Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney who brought criminal charges against Trump and his allies for their efforts to overturn the Georgia election. It's a story about the collision between a local prosecutor and a former president, between the ordinary machinery of justice and the extraordinary claims of someone who refused to accept that he had lost.

At seventy-two years old, Isikoff is still doing what he's always done: following the story wherever it leads, regardless of which powerful people might be discomfited.

The Investigative Journalist's Life

Isikoff married Mary Ann Akers, a former political gossip columnist for the Washington Post, in January 2007. They have a son, Zachary, born in 2009. He was previously married to Lisa Stein, with whom he has a daughter, Willa.

There's something fitting about an investigative journalist married to a gossip columnist. Both trades deal in information that powerful people would prefer to keep hidden. The difference is largely in what counts as news: scandal in the private lives of politicians versus scandal in their public duties. But the skills—cultivating sources, building trust, knowing when to push and when to wait—overlap considerably.

Isikoff has also been a contributing blogger at the Huffington Post and has appeared on Democracy Now!, the progressive news program. His "Terror Watch" column with fellow journalist Mark Hosenball won the 2005 Society of Professional Journalists award for best investigative reporting online. In 2017, he created a short film called "64 Hours in October: How One Weekend Blew Up the Rules of American Politics," examining the chaotic weekend of October 7-9, 2016—when the Access Hollywood tape leaked, WikiLeaks released stolen emails from Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, and the trajectory of American politics shifted in ways we're still grappling with.

What Investigative Journalism Costs

If you read through Isikoff's career, a pattern emerges. He gets the story. He verifies it as best he can. He publishes it. And then comes the backlash.

The Quran story brought accusations of irresponsibility and contributing to deaths overseas. The Clinton-Lewinsky story got killed by his own editors, only to be broken by someone else. His Yahoo News article on Carter Page became ammunition in a political fight he didn't start. Even when his reporting is vindicated—as with the broader pattern of Guantanamo abuse, or the CIA's Assange plots—the immediate response is often denial, attack, and controversy.

This is the bargain investigative journalists make. You spend weeks or months cultivating sources, verifying facts, building a story that someone powerful doesn't want told. And when you publish, you face not gratitude but hostility—from the subjects of your reporting, certainly, but also from those who find your conclusions inconvenient, from critics who question your methods, from readers who don't want to believe uncomfortable truths.

Isikoff has been doing this for nearly fifty years, since his hundred-dollar-a-week days at the Alton Telegraph. That persistence—that willingness to keep digging, keep publishing, keep facing the blowback—is what separates the career investigative journalists from everyone else. It's not glamorous. It's rarely appreciated in the moment. But it's essential to democracy.

Without reporters like Isikoff, we wouldn't know about Abu Ghraib. We wouldn't know about the selling of the Iraq War. We wouldn't know about CIA plots to kidnap journalists. We might eventually find out, years or decades later, when documents are declassified or memoirs are written. But by then it's too late to do anything about it.

The investigative journalist's job is to make sure we know now, while it still matters, while there's still time to hold the powerful accountable. It's messy, imperfect work. Sometimes you get the details wrong. Sometimes your editors kill your best stories. Sometimes your reporting gets weaponized by people with agendas you don't share.

But you keep going. You keep digging. You keep publishing.

That's what Michael Isikoff has done for half a century. Whatever you think of any particular story he's written, that dedication to the craft is something worth understanding—and, perhaps, worth celebrating.