Glenn Greenwald unleashed a bit of vitriol over the weekend, taking out his knives for his former friend, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow.
“I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow,” he told New York Magazine in an interview published Sunday. “And I’ve seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.”
Greenwald snagged a Pulitzer Prize in 2013 for his work with NSA leaker Edward Snowden and later founded his own company, First Look Media, with the help of billionaire Pierre Omidyar.
A spokesperson for MSNBC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TheWrap.
From his hideaway in Brazil, the journalist has become one of the most consistent liberal critics of the Trump-Russia collusion story. His advocacy of the president’s line has made him a favorite liberal of Fox News host Tucker Carlson but has also resulted in his “excommunication” from both MSNBC and his former claque of liberal friends, according to author New York writer Simon van Zuylen-Wood.
“Thanks to this never-ending hot take, Greenwald has been excommunicated from the liberal salons that celebrated him in the Snowden era; anybody who questions the Russia consensus, he says, ‘becomes a blasphemer. Becomes a heretic. I think that’s what they see me as,’” Zuylen-Wood wrote.
Greenwald himself has detailed the reason for his skepticism of the Russia probe. In a widely read piece for his website, TheIntercept, last month, he blasted media companies as looking for a story that wasn’t there — and what he said was the erroneous coverage that kind journalism led to.
“Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump-Russia story and about Russia particularly,” wrote Greenwald. “At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes.”