Yglesias Award Nominee

"Journalists reporting on high-profile legal or political controversies cannot function effectively without offering some measure of confidentiality to their sources. Their ability to do so yields substantial benefits to the public in the form of stories that might otherwise never be written about corruption, misfeasance and abuse of power. A person with information about wrongdoing is often vulnerable to retaliation if exposed as an informant," – Ted Olson, conservative Republican, who hasn’t quite surrendered to the notion of an untrammeled executive in a constitutional democracy.