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Glenn Greenwald Attacks Hillary Clinton

"Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing." - Gay journalist Glenn Greenwald, speaking to GQ Magazine.

Out Issues Power 50 Ranking

Out Magazine today published its eighth annual ranking of the 50 most powerful LGBT people in the United States.  Here's a bit of the list.

1. Ellen DeGeneres
2. Tim Cook
3. Rachel Maddow
4. Sen. Tammy Baldwin
5. Glenn Greenwald
6. Ryan Murphy
7. Neil Patrick Harris
8. Andy Cohen
9. Michael Sam
10. Robin Roberts

Homocon billionaire Peter Thiel is #13. Former RNC chairman Ken Mehlman is #18. Andrew Sullivan is #26. New to the list is DOMA attorney Roberta Kaplan at #47. Curiously missing from this year's ranking is closeted homocon blogger Matt Drudge, who ranked at #21 last year and at #16 in 2012. Since there's no obvious reason for Drudge to completely fall off the list in one year, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody got a cease-and-desist letter.

Glenn Greenwald Returns To US For First Time Since Breaking NSA/Snowden Story

Gay journalist Glenn Greenwald returned to the United States today for the first time since breaking the Edward Snowden story. Some have called for his arrest as Snowden's alleged co-conspirator. Greenwald himself said he expected to be detained at once, but he exited JFK airport without incident. TIME reports on the reason for today's visit:

Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, who broke the Snowden story and met with the whistleblower in Hong Kong, are in New York City to receive the prestigious George Polk Award. Greenwald, formerly a columnist for The Guardian and now a partner in the upcoming First Look Media venture, and Poitras, a documentary filmmaker, will share the journalism award with Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, the Huffington Post reports. Greenwald, who currently resides in Rio de Janeiro, told The Huffington Post that he wanted to return to the U.S. because “certain factions in the U.S. government have deliberately intensified the threatening climate for journalists.” He noted that language used by government officials suggested that reporters who investigated Snowden’s documents were complicit with him.

HomoQuotable - Glenn Greenwald

“I absolutely refuse to be exiled from my own country for the crime of doing journalism, and I’m gonna force the issue just on principle, and I think coming back for a ceremony like the Polk Award or other forms of journalistic awards would be a really good symbolic test to put the government in the position of having to arrest journalists who are coming back to the U.S. to receive awards for the journalism they’ve done.” - Glenn Greenwald, telling Huff Post Live that he will likely return from Brazil to accept a journalism award even though some have called for his arrest as an accomplice to NSA leaker Edward Snowden.

REPORT: Partner Of Glenn Greenwald Was Carrying 58,000 "Sensitive" Documents

Politico reports:

David Miranda, the partner of journalist Glenn Greenwald, was carrying 58,000 classified intelligence documents when he was detained by British authorities earlier this month, according to a new UK national security report. Miranda was detained for nine hours at London's Heathrow airport, a move that Greenwald called "a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process." But today's 13-page report, from UK deputy national security adviser Oliver Robbins, has reinforced Greenwald's critics, who believe he and his partner are hiding behind claims of journalistic freedom while disobeying the law.

Scotland Yard has launched a criminal investigation against Miranda.  Greenwald is quoted today by the Telegraph:

“The UK Government is incapable of pointing to a single story we have published that has even arguably harmed national security. The only thing that has been harmed are the political interests and reputations of UK and US officials around the world, as they have been caught engaging in illegal, unconstitutional and truly dangerous bulk surveillance aimed at their own citizens and people around the world, all with little accountability or transparency - until now."

Rep. Peter King Calls For Prosecuting Journalist Glenn Greenwald Over NSA Leak

Rep. Peter King (R-NY) today called for the prosecution of openly gay journalist Glenn Greenwald for publishing the story about NSA leaker Edward Snowden. King appeared this afternoon on Fox News to make his threat.

“Not only did [Greenwald] disclose this information, he said he has names of CIA agents and assets around the world and threatening to disclose that,” King said when asked by host Megyn Kelly why he wants to prosecute the reporter. “I think [prosecuting reporters] should be very targeted and very selective and a rare exception. In this case, when you have someone who discloses secrets like this and threatens to release more, yes, there has to be legal action taken against him.” He then asserted: “This is a very unusual case with life-and-death implications for Americans.”

Video via Think Progress. Greenwald fires back via Twitter below.

Feds Confirm Secret Data Collection

Last night the Obama administration confirmed that it has been using Facebook, Google, and Apple to secretly collect data on foreigners overseas. The story was first broken by openly gay journalist Glenn Greenwald in articles published by the Guardian and the Washington Post. Today the New York Times reports on the acknowledgement by the feds:

The confirmation of the classified program came just hours after government officials acknowledged a separate seven-year effort to sweep up records of telephone calls inside the United States. Together, the unfolding revelations opened a window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration. Government officials defended the two surveillance initiatives as authorized under law, known to Congress and necessary to guard the country against terrorist threats. But an array of civil liberties advocates and libertarian conservatives said the disclosures provided the most detailed confirmation yet of what has been long suspected about what the critics call an alarming and ever-widening surveillance state.

Federal officials said that the data collected "cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States." Information was collected via chat logs, video conferencing, emails, photos, and file transfers.

Greenwald appeared on CNN last night.

"There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States but around the world,” charged Glenn Greenwald. “So whatever the Justice Department wants to do, they can beat their chests all they want,” he said. “People like Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss can have press conferences threatening people for bringing … light to what it is they’re doing, but the only people who are going to be investigated are them. It’s well past time that these threats start to be treated with the contempt that they deserve. That’s certainly how I intend to treat them moving forward, with more investigation and disclosures.”

RELATED: Greenwald lives in Brazil because DOMA bars him from bringing his husband to the United States.