Murray S. Waas

Murray S. Waas is an American independent investigative journalist known most recently for his coverage of the White House planning for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and ensuing controversies and American political scandals such as the Plame affair (also known as the "CIA leak grand jury investigation", the " CIA leak scandal", and " Plamegate"). For much of his career, Waas focused on national security reporting, but has also written about social issues and corporate malfeasance. His articles about the second Iraq war and Plame affair matters have appeared in ''National Journal'', where he has worked as a staff correspondent and contributing editor, ''The Atlantic'', and, earlier ''The American Prospect''.Matt Welch
"Salon's Coverage Commands Respect for Net Journalists"
''Online Journalism Review'' ( Annenberg School for Communication at USC), (April 30, 1998). Retrieved August 26, 2007.

Waas also comments on contemporary American political controversies in his personal blogs ''Whatever Already!'' and at ''The Huffington Post''. An "instant book", the ''United States v. I. Lewis Libby'', which he edited, with research assistance by Jeff Lomonaco, was published by Union Square Press (an imprint of Sterling Publishing) in June 2007.Press release, Sterling Publishing, March 6, 2007
"Press Room"

US_v_ILewisLibby_Release.doc
(Downloadable document file); cf
catalogue description
; both retrieved June 21, 2007. ote: The downloadable press release file is misnamed; it is not a ".pdf" file; it is a ".doc" file.!--Checked and updated check on August 16, 2007. To access the downloadable DOC file misnamed with the faulty PDF extension, one must download it and then rename it with the DOC extension prior to opening it. Acrobat Reader does not open it, because it is actually a DOC file; the error might be corrected by the publisher's website in the future.-->For related information, see Murray Waas
"A Book"
''Whatever Already!'' (blog), March 6, 2007 an

''Whatever Already!'' (blog), June 20, 2007; both retrieved June 21, 2007.

Personal history

Waas was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and originally hoped to have a career in law and city politics ("To be the district attorney and mayor of the City of Philadelphia"), but he dropped out of George Washington University before graduating.Liz Halloran
"A Muckraker's Day in the Sun"
, interview with Murray Waas, '' U.S. News & World Report''. (May 15, 2006) Retrieved April 29, 2007.

In 1987, when Waas was only twenty-six years old, he learned that he had a life-threatening "advanced form" of cancer. On June 26, 2006, ''Washington Post'' media writer Howard Kurtz disclosed that Waas had been told that he had an "incurable Stage C" cancer and faced a "terminal diagnosis." Howard Kurtz
"Writer Sat on His Own Life-and-Death Story."
''The Washington Post''. (June 25, 2006). C-01. Retrieved June 21, 2007.Murray Waas
"A Reporter's Bias"
''The Huffington Post''. (June 26, 2006). Retrieved May 11, 2011.Murray Waas
"The Wag Time Pet Spa Conspiracy ... And a Cancer Survivor's Right to Respect"
''The Huffington Post'' (personal blog). (December 21, 2006). Retrieved June 21, 2007; contains hyperlink to Kurtz's article and his own related blog entries.

Subsequently, Waas successfully sued the George Washington University Medical Center, which had negligently "failed to diagnose his cancer, winning a $650,000 judgment ... in a 1992 verdict ... upheld by the D.C. Court of Appeals." Although, according to a pathologist hired by Waas to testify in the case, "over 90% of uchpatients... are dead within two years," Waas survived and was later declared "cancer-free." His recovery and survival were later described as a "miracle" by the physicians treating him. In winning the appeal of the jury's verdict by the hospital, the appeals court devised new case law expanding the rights of cancer patients and ordinary patients to sue and seek justice because of medical mistakes.

Although he initially shied away from writing about health care because of his history as a cancer survivor, in 2009 and 2010, Waas weighed in with a series of articles for Reuters, detailing how many of the nation's largest health insurance companies, improperly, and even illegally, canceled the policies of tens of thousands of customers shortly after they were diagnosed with HIV, cancer, and other life-threatening but costly diseases.Murray Waas
"Insurers Targeted HIV Patients to Drop Coverage"
Reuters. (March 17, 2010). Retrieved May 10, 2010. One story disclosed that the health insurer, WellPoint, using a computer algorithm, identified women recently diagnosed with breast cancer and then singled them out for cancellation of their policies.Murray Waas
"WellPoint Routinely Targets Breast Cancer Patients"
euters, via ''Common Dreams''. (April 24, 2010). Retrieved May 10, 2011. The story not only caused considerable public outrage, but led Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, and President Barack Obama, to call on WellPoint to end the practice.Michele Gershberg
"U.S. to WellPoint: Stop Dropping Breast Cancer Patients"
Reuters. (April 23, 2010. Retrieved May 10, 2011.Avery Johnson and Dinah Wisenberg Brin
"War of Words Heats Up Between Obama, WellPoint,"
''The Wall Street Journal''. (May 11, 2010). Retrieved May 11, 2011.

Pressured by the Obama administration, WellPoint and the nation's other largest health insurers agreed to immediately end the practice."End to Rescission and More Good News"
''The New York Times'' (editorial). (May 2, 2010). Retrieved May 10, 2010. Waas was credited with saving the lives of countless other cancer patients like himself, and making sure that thousands of other people did not have their insurance unfairly canceled.Timothy Noah
"Obama vs. WellPoint: How the Insurance Giant's Bad Behavior Advances Health Reform"
Slate. (May 20, 2010). Retrieved May 20, 2011.Reynolds staf
"''Reuters'' and '' Milwaukee Journal'' Receive 2010 Barlett & Steele Awards,"
Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, Walter Cronkite School, Arizona State University. (October 4, 2010). Retrieved May 11, 2011. He won the Barlett & Steele Award for Business Investigative Reporting from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication of Arizona State University as well as other honors for the stories.Jim Impoc
"Thomson Reuters Wins 5 SABEW Best in the Business Awards"
''Reuters''. March 23, 2010). Retrieved May 11, 2011.

Professional career

While still attending college, Waas began working for American newspaper columnist Jack Anderson. His journalistic work has since been published in such publications and outlets as ''The New Yorker'', ''The Atlantic'',''The Los Angeles Times'', ''The New York Times'', ''The Guardian''. ''The Boston Globe'', ''The Washington Post'', '' McClatchy Newspapers'', Reuters, the Associated Press, ABC News, ''The New York Review of Books'', ''New York Magazine'', ''Foreign Policy'', '' Vox'', '' Harper's'', ''The New Republic'', ''The American Prospect'', ''The Nation'', and ''The Village Voice''.

In his twenties he was a staff writer and investigative correspondent for ''The Village Voice''. The current masthead of the ''Voice'' lists Waas as a "Contributors Emeritus" to the newspaper, along with such other writers, critics, investigative reporters, and cartoonists who worked for the paper during the same era, such as Wayne Barrett, Jack Newfield, Teresa Carpenter, Ron Rosenbaum, Norman Mailer, Mim Udovitch, Matt Groening and Mark Alan Stamaty.

Waas first worked for columnist Anderson at age 18, the summer of his freshman year of college: "When I went out for interviews, the subjects took one look at me and just laughed out loud. I was one of those 18-year-old kids who looked 15."Murray Waas
"Jack Anderson: An Appreciation: The Muckraking Outsider Never Gave a Damn about Entree"
''The Village Voice''. (December 19, 2005). Retrieved August 16, 2007.

In an obituary of Anderson, ''The New York Times'' wrote that Anderson's column was "the nation's most widely read, longest-running political column," and that Anderson liked to boast that "he and his staff of eager investigators did daily what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein did just once when they dug out the truth of the Watergate scandal." One sympathetic biographer, Mark Feldstein, wrote that Anderson had flaws which "could be glaring. He was bombastic and self-righteous", presenting himself and his work in a "cliche-ridden evangelical style was an anachronism that sacrificed complex truths for simplistic but dramatic portrayals of good guys vs. bad.” And yet, wrote Feldstein, Anderson "was a bridge for the muckrakers of a century ago and the crop that came out of Watergate.”Murray Waas
"Jack Anderson: An Appreciation: The Muckraking Outsider Never Gave a Damn about Entree"
''The Village Voice''. (December 19, 2005). Retrieved August 16, 2007.

In his own appreciation of Anderson, which Waas published in ''The Village Voice'', after the columnist's death at the age of 83, columns he wrote for Anderson advocating that economic sanctions be imposed against the Ugandan regime of Idi Amin, likely led to the overthrow of Amin's genocidal regime.

The series of columns we nderson and Waasproduced regarding the role of U.S. companies doing business with Idi Amin were instrumental in leading to the imposition of U.S. economic sanctions against the Amin regime, according to the congressman who originally sponsored legislation seeking the sanctions, and other key congressional staffers who worked on the issue. Some historians in turn say the sanctions may have played an instrumental role in Amin's subsequent overthrow.Murray Waas
"Jack Anderson: An Appreciation: The Muckraking Outsider Never Gave a Damn about Entree"
''The Village Voice''. (December 19, 2005). Retrieved August 16, 2007.

Ralph Nurnberger, a former staffer on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and professor at Georgetown University, later concluded in a study for the ''African Studies Review'' that the economic sanctions imposed against Amin by the U.S. likely led to Amin's downfall.

Nurnberger wrote that the congressional initiative to impose the sanctions had garnered scant attention or support outside a small number of members of Congress and congressional staff interested in the matter until "Jack Anderson assigned one of his reporters, Murray Waas to follow the issue" and write regularly about it.

"During the next several months, Waas wrote a dozen columns for Anderson dealing with U.S.-Ugandan relations", Nurnberger wrote, "He served as a useful contact for the congressional staff investigating this subject as well as Uganda expatriates who wanted to 'leak' stories to the press."Ralph Nurnberger
"Why Sanctions Never Work: In The Case of Idi Amin, They Clearly Helped Drive Him From Power"
''International Economy''. (Fall, 2003). Retrieved October 20, 2011.

The tremendous reach of Anderson's column amplified Waas' reporting on Amin and his advocacy of sanctions, without which the sanctions legislation would have been unlike to have caused the overthrow of the Amin regime. At the time, Anderson's columns were published in more than 1,000 newspapers, which in turn had 40 million readers. Waas was eighteen and nineteen years old at the time he wrote the columns.

Prior to his overthrow from power, Amin had been alleged to have engaged in genocide and killed between 150,000 and 500,000 of his own citizens. The late Sen. Frank Church (D-Id.), a chairman of the Senate Foreign Committee, later said the congressionally imposed boycott "had a profound impact on the internal conditions nside Ugandaand contributed to the fall of Idi Amin." Sen. Mark Hatfield (R-Or.), commented that the sanctions "provided the psychological and practical ingredients to complete a formula that would come to break Amin's seemingly invincible survivability."

In an article about the sanctions, published in 2003, Foreign Policy magazine concluded that "the American sanctions proved devastating to the Ugandan economy" and that "they helped set in motion the events that led to the fall of the regime."

The ''Foreign Policy'' article described the overwhelming and staggering odds to become enacted into law, and official U.S. policy:

:State De­partment officials argued that as a major trading power, the United States should op­pose restraint of trade for political purposes. Although the U.S. government officially deplored massive violations of human rights in Uganda, U.S. long-term interest in an in­ternational economic system with minimal barriers would ultimately suffer from such action. A boycott against Uganda, the Wash­ington Post editorialized in November 1977, would set "a dangerous precedent for more of the same political manipulation of interna­tional trade in less egregious cases." It asserted that the world’s richest trading power should not arbitrarily use its massive economic power unilaterally to force the government of a smaller and weaker state to alter its internal treatment of subjects.

Such long odds only underscored the crucial role Waas' reporting and the power of the Anderson column were for U.S. sanctions in Uganda becoming U.S. policy.

During the Reagan administration, Waas was among a small group of reporters involved in breaking the story of the Iran-Contra affair.

Waas won an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship in 1992 to research and write about the rights of the institutionalized and incarcerated in the U.S. For his fellowship, he investigated substandard conditions and questionable deaths at institutions for the mentally retarded, mental hospitals, nursing homes, juvenile detention centers, and jails and prisons.

As part of his work for the Alicia Patterson Foundation, Waas published a 7,912 word article in the ''Los Angeles Times'' on April 3, 1994, detailing how mentally retarded children institutionalized by the District of Columbia government had died because of abuse and neglect.Murray Waas
"Bleak House: As Patients Died One by One, a Washington D.C. Home for the Mentally Retarded Became One of the Nation's Deadliest Institutions"
''Los Angeles Times''. (April 4, 1994). Retrieved May 10, 2010. The story led to renewed scrutiny by the U.S. Department of Justice of the city's treatment of its mentally retarded wards and spurred on the settlement of a civil suit brought against the city government by the parents of several children who had died due to abuse or neglect.Murray Waas
"$1 Million Settlement Due in Death of Six Retarded Persons,"
''Los Angeles Times''. (April 4, 1994). Retrieved May 11, 2011.

In 1998 and 1999, Waas reported on Whitewater and the Clinton impeachment for ''Salon.com''.

Following the presidency of George Herbert Walker Bush, in 1993, while a reporter for the ''Los Angeles Times'', Waas, along with his ''Los Angeles Times'' colleague Douglas Frantz, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of national reporting for his stories detailing that administration's prewar foreign policy towards the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein That same year, Waas was also a recipient of the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, awarded by the Joan Shorenstein Barone Center on The Press, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government of Harvard University, for "a series that detailed United States policy toward Iraq before the Persian Gulf war".

As part of that reporting, on March 10, 1992, Waas and Frantz disclosed that the Reagan and Bush administrations had engaged in secret intelligence sharing with Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, after falsely telling Congress and the congressional intelligence committees that it had long ago ended all such cooperation. The two reporters wrote: "The Bush Administration shared intelligence information with the regime of Saddam Hussein until at least May, 1990, three months before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, according to formerly classified documents ... even though Congress had been told Congress that such cooperation ended in 1988 when the war between Iraq and Iran ended."

Also as part of that same series, the two reporters disclosed on April 18, 1992, that "The Bush and Ronald Reagan administrations secretly allowed Saudi Arabia to provide American-made weapons to the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein and other nations over a period of almost 10 years in covert operations designed to sidestep legal restrictions imposed by Congress, according to classified documents."

Regarding the significance of these various disclosures, ''The New York Times'', columnist Anthony Lewis wrote on June 18, 1992:

:With all that was and still is at stake in Iraq ... What ere the Reagan and Bush administrationsdoing while the Iraqi dictator was growing into such a menace? ... hereis a shocking answer: The United States was feeding Saddam Hussein's war machine and his ambition.

:That is the consistent theme of reports in ''The New York Times'' in a piece by Seymour Hersh, and in a series by Murray Waas and Douglas Frantz in the ''Los Angeles Times'' . ... In 1982 the Reagan Administration, wanting to prevent Saddam Hussein's defeat in the war with Iran, decided to provide him with secret intelligence. The intelligence helped Iraq learn the disposition of Iranian forces.

:The Administration also allowed Iraq's regional allies, which at the time included Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan, to send Baghdad American-made arms ...

:The United States immediately began giving Iraq guarantees for credit to buy American farm products. Farm and other credits for Iraq eventually came to $3 billion -- no doubt freeing Saddam Hussein to spend money on arms."

Also in 1992, Waas disclosed in an investigative story in ''The Los Angeles Times'' that the George H. W. Bush administration had allowed Pakistan "to buy American-made arms" from U.S. commercial firms, despite a federal law that prohibited such sales unless the President were to certify to Congress that "Pakistan does not possess a nuclear explosive device." (At the time, Pakistan maintained a nuclear arsenal.). The March, 1992 story led to several powerful members of Congress to assert that Bush administration was violating federal law by allowing for the arms sales. The late Senator John Glenn, Democrat of Ohio, told Waas: "They knew what the intent of the law was. The legislative history was clear." The arms ban "was signed by the President and into law. And then his wnAdministration took steps not to comply with it." Then-Senator Claiborne Pell, Republican of Rhode Island, chairman of the Senate Foreign Services Committee, said that the Bush State Department "has knowingly violated federal law by permitting" the "sales of arms to Pakistan."

More recently, Waas worked as a national correspondent and contributing editor of ''National Journal''.

Summarizing the stories that Waas wrote for ''National Journal'' during 2005 and 2006 about the second Bush administration's policies that led up to war with Iraq, ''The Washington Post'' online White House columnist Dan Froomkin, wrote on March 31, 2006:

:Slowly but surely, investigative reporter Murray Waas has been putting together a compelling narrative about how President Bush and his top aides contrived their bogus case for war in Iraq; how they succeeded in keeping charges of deception from becoming a major issue in the 2004 election; and how they continue to keep most of the press off the trail to this day.

:What emerges in Waas's stories is a consistent White House modus operandi: That time and time again, Bush and his aides have selectively leaked or declassified secret intelligence findings that served their political agenda -- while aggressively asserting the need to keep secret the information that would tend to discredit them.Dan Froomkin
"A Compelling Story"
''The Washington Post''. (March 31, 2006). Retrieved May 10, 2010.

While writing about the second Bush administration's policies that led up to war with Iraq, Waas simultaneously reported about the investigation of CIA leak prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald's investigation as to who leaked covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to the press—illustrating in his reporting how the two stories were inextricably linked in that the effort to damage Plame was part of a broader Bush White House effort to discredit those who were alleging that it had misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war.Murray Waa
"What Bush Was Told About Iraq"
''National Journal''. (May 14, 2006). Retrieved June 26, 2011.Murray Waas
"Insulating Bush"
''National Journal''.(April 1, 2006). Retrieved June 26, 2011.

Plame's identity as a covert CIA agent was leaked to the media by senior Bush White House officials to discredit and retaliate against her husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, who had alleged the Bush administration misrepresented intelligence information to make the case to go to war with Saddam Hussein. I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was later convicted on federal charges of perjury and obstruction of justice in an attempt to conceal his own role and that of others in the Bush White House in outing Plame, although President Bush would later commute Libby's thirty-month prison sentence. (President Bush's then chief political adviser, Karl Rove, was investigated by the special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, as well, but not charged.) Waas not only wrote the first story disclosing that it was Libby who had leaked Plame's identity to ''New York Times'' reporter Judith Miller, but the same story also paved the way for Miller, then in jail for more than a hundred days, to be released and testify against Libby.Murray Waas
"The Meeting"
''American Prospect''. (October 4, 2005) Howard Kurtzbr>"The Lone Ranger"
''The Washington Post''. (April 17, 2006). Retrieved May 10, 2011.

On August 6, 2005, Waas disclosed for the first time that it was Libby who had provided Plame's name to Miller, writing: "I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has told federal investigators that he met with ''New York Times'' reporter Judith Miller on July 8, 2003, and discussed CIA operative Valerie Plame, according to legal sources familiar with Libby's account.Josh Gerstein
"Prosecutor Thought Libby Deliberately Failed to Intervene on Reporter's Behalf"
'' New York Sun''. (October 4, 2005). Retrieved May 10, 2011.

That same story also disclosed that Libby was encouraging Miller to stay in jail and not reveal that Libby was her source. A short time later, citing the Waas story, prosecutor Fitzgerald wrote Libby's attorney, alleging that "Libby had simply decided that encouraging Ms. Miller to testify was not in his best interest" and that Libby discouraging Miller to testify might be an illegal effort to obstruct his investigation. As a result, Libby then wrote and called Miller saying that it was alright for her to testify. After spending more than a hundred days in jail, Miller was released, whereupon she provided testimony and evidence to prosecutors against Libby, directly leading to Libby's indictment, and subsequent conviction, on multiple federal criminal charges of obstruction of justice and perjury. ''Washington Post'' media columnist Howard Kurtz wrote on April 17, 2006, that Waas' account "set in motion the waiver springing Miller from jail on contempt charges."

Regarding these same stories on the Plame case, as well as his earlier stories on the misrepresentation of intelligence information by the Bush administration to take the U.S. to war with Iraq, New York University journalism professor and press critic Jay Rosen wrote that Waas had the promise to be his generation's ""new Bob Woodward": "Today the biggest story in town is what really went down as the Bush team drove deceptively to war, and later tried to conceal how bad the deception—and decision-making—had been." Waas, Rosen wrote, had been doing "what Woodward has a reputation for doing: finding, tracking, breaking it into reportable parts.

Writing in the ''American Prospect'', political journalist Greg Sargent opined at the time that Waas' reporting on both the misuse of intelligence by the Bush administration to take the nation to war with Iraq, combined with his reporting on the outing of Valeire Plame, provided a framework and context for the public to finally understand the inextricable link between these two "disparate subplots". Sargent explained:

: hetrue larger significance of Waas' reporting is still crying out to be explained.

:To do this we need to step back and look at his revelations in the context of the ongoing investigation into the outing of Valerie Plame. If you do, you can see that what once were a bunch of disparate subplots -- the pre-war duplicity, the 2004 election, the Libby indictment, the continuing investigation into Karl Rove -- suddenly can be woven together into one grand narrative that makes coherent sense in a way that much of this story didn't before.Greg Sargent
"The Plame Game: What Murray Waas' Big Scoop May Really Tell us About Bush's Pre-war Deceptions"
''The American Prospect''. (April 4, 2006). Retrieved August 20, 2007.

Several of Waas's later published accounts of that aspect of the Plame affair informed his Union Square Press book on the Libby trial published in June 2007, which he discusses in some detail in his interview with Amy Goodman on '' Democracy Now!''.Amy Goodman
"Ex-Cheney Chief of Staff Lewis 'Scooter' Libby Convicted of Perjury, Obstruction in CIA Leak Trial"
. Interview with Murray Waas and Marcy Wheeler. '' Democracy Now!''. (March 7, 2007). Retrieved June 20, 2007.

During the final days of the 2012 presidential campaign, Waas wrote a series of articles for the ''Boston Globe'' detailing how Mitt Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, had implemented policies to restrict the rights of the state's LGBT community, as a way to curry favor with conservative and evangelical voters who vote in large numbers in the Republican presidential primaries. Among those policies, Waas disclosed, Romney refused to grant birth certificates to the children of same sex parents. Confidential state records obtained by Waas showed that a senior Department of Public Health lawyer warned the Romney administration that the failure to provide birth certificates to these children would constitute "'violations of existing statutes,' impair law enforcement and security efforts in a post 9/11 world, and would cause the children to encounter difficulties later in life as they tried to register for school, obtain a driver's license or a passport, enlist in the military, or even vote."

The reaction to the Waas stories on Romney, especially the one about denying birth certificates to the children of same sex parents was swift. Outraged civil rights and LGBT groups condemning Romney—in the days just prior to the election. Chad Griffin, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the nation's largest gay-rights advocacy organization, said in a statement: "Mitt Romney has stood before the American people multiple times and said he does not support discrimination against LGBT people – and that is an outright lie.’’ Griffin further commented that by "denying birth certificates to children f same sex parents.. Romney has undertaken to disenfranchise LGBT people.’’

During the Trump administration, Waas was one of the first reporters to write about efforts by the ''National Enquirer'', its parent company, American Media, Inc., and President Trump's then-personal attorney and fixer, Michael Cohen, to pay hush money to women with whom Trump had extramarital affairs.

Also during the Trump administration, Waas broke more than two dozen significant stories regarding special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, focusing primarily on whether President Trump obstructed justice. Those stories appeared in ''The New York Review of Books'', ''The New York Times'', '' Vox'', and ''Foreign Policy''.

Waas broke the first story disclosing that former FBI Director James Comey had corroboratory witnesses when it came to Comey's allegations that President Trump ordered him to shut down an FBI investigation into whether his then National Security Advisor Micheal Flynn had lied to the FBI about his conversations with a Russian diplomat, while Trump and Comey were completely alone in the Oval Office, on February 14, 2017. Special Counsel Mueller investigated Comey's allegations as a potential obstruction of justice by Trump.

Trump and his political supporters had prior to Waas' story argued that Trump would not face any serious legal jeopardy, as a result of Comey's allegations, because whatever was said or transpired between Trump and Comey, was based solely on the word of the President of the United States against the FBI Director he had only recently fired: "We have to keep in mind that is one person's record of what happened," Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel said on Fox News in one typical comment repeated by Trump White House surrogates. "The only two people who know what happened in these meetings are the president and James Comey.""

But in a June 7, 2017 report in ''Vox'', Waas disclosed that Comey contemporaneously spoke at length with three of his top aides about the president ordering him to shut down the FBI investigation of Flynn. Waas wrote: "Those three officials, according to two people with detailed, firsthand knowledge of the matter, were Jim Rybicki, Comey's chief of staff and senior counselor; James Baker, the FBI's general counsel; and Andrew McCabe, then the bureau's deputy director, and now the acting director." The Trump White House denied that this could have been true, asserting that Comey could not have told his three aides about something that never happened in the first place. But Comey himself confirmed that this was case when he testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee the following day, in response to questions prompted by the Waas story.

Waas also was one of the first reporters to disclose how President Trump attempted to exploit the U.S. Department of Justice to improperly investigate his perceived political enemies. On November 9, 2018, Waas reported in '' Vox'' that then-Acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker "privately provided advice to the president last year on how the White House might be able to pressure the Justice Department to investigate the president's political adversaries"—more specifically, also disclosing for the first time, that Whitaker had "counseled the president in private on how the White House might be able to pressure the Justice Department to name a special counsel to investigate... Hillary Clinton.""

On November 20, ''The New York Times'', citing Vox's original story, reported that the newspaper's own sources had independently confirmed that President Trump had "repeatedly pressed Justice Department officials about the status of Clinton-related investigations, including Mr. Whitaker." The ''Times'' story went even further, disclosing that Trump ordered his then-White House Counsel, Don McGahn, to prosecute two of his political adversaries", Hillary Clinton and James Comey, even if there was no real evidence that either did anything wrong. McGahn was so distressed by Trump's demands, The ''Times'' reported, that the White House Counsel warned the president in a memo that Trump might face "possible impeachment" if he persisted with such efforts.

Based on the disclosures in the ''Vox'' and ''The New York Times'' reports, Senate Majority Leader, Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, requested that the Justice Department's Inspector General investigate Whitaker's conduct. Schumer wanted the Inspector General to investigate allegations "by veteran journalist Murray Waas n ''Vox'', whichrevealed that Whitaker, while he was serving as chief of staff to hen-Attorney General JeffSessions, was counseling the White House on how the president might pressure Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to direct the Justice Department to investigate Trump's enemies." Schumer also asked the Justice Department to investigate whether, Whitaker, while Acting Attorney General "may have shared with the White House... confidential grand jury or investigative information from the Special Counsel investigation."

In 2019, Waas broke numerous exclusive stories for ''Vox'' and ''The New York Review of Books'' about the impeachment investigation of President Trump. As explained by Waas in ''Vox'', "At the core of the impeachment inquiry is a substantial body of evidence that President Trump, both personally and through subordinates, pushed Ukraine to investigate former Vice President's Joe Biden's son, Hunter, and his business dealings in Ukraine. This pressure campaign stood to materially benefit Trump's 2020 presidential reelection effort by manufacturing dirt against a key rival. It is alleged that Trump withheld $390 million in congressionally-approved military assistance to Ukraine for months pending Zelensky's public agreement to open an investigation."

In 2019 and 2020, Waas broke a number of exclusive stories in ''The New York Review of Books'' and ''The Guardian'' regarding the politicization and corruption of the Department of Justice during the Trump administration.

In 2021 and 2022, Waas wrote a series of investigative stories about the attorneys who while working with, and to the benefit of, then president Donald Trump, attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, in part by "propagating increasingly implausible conspiracy theories to federal courts that Joe Biden’s election as president of the United States was illegitimate."

In a Dec. 2, 2021 article in ''The Guardian'', Waas disclosed that one of the lead attorneys in that effort, Sidney Powell, had "on several occasions represented to federal courts that people were co-counsel or plaintiffs in her cases without seeking their permission to do so. Some of these individuals say that they found out that Powell had named them only once the cases were already filed." On the very next day, Waas disclosed in ''The Guardian'' that Powell had "filed false incorporation papers with the state of Texas for a non-profit she heads, Defending the Republic" when she "listed two men whom she said served with her on the organization’s board of directors, even though neither one of them gave Powell permission to do so." The Waas article also first disclosed that a federal grand jury was investigating "allegations of fundraising and financial fraud by Powell in the running of her non-profit", and "whether Powell diverted money from Fitzgerald CIA leak grand jury investigation">investigation