Eli Lake

Who is Eli Lake?

Eli Lake, is an American journalist and political commentator known primarily as the national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek as well as for being frequent contributor to the Bloggingheads.tv website.

Lake graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut in 1994. He then served as a national security reporter at the New York Sun and as the State Department correspondent for United Press International. Until 2011, he was a contributing editor for The New Republic.

Lake has been criticized for reporting based on faulty information and questionable sources. In particular, Lake has faced criticism for failing to corroborate claims made by U.S. government sources about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq during the Iraq War and about the foreign associations of Iraqi political figures, and for misreporting that a 2013 shutdown of U.S. embassies in Middle Eastern countries was based on the U.S. government's interception of an Al-Qaeda "conference call". In addition, the objectivity of Lake's regular praise for the government of the Republic of Georgia was called into question in 2011 after it was revealed that he was a close friend of one of the country's top Washington lobbyists, and that the lobbyist had been paying for Lake's tabs at restaurants and bars.