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Greenwald aims to pre-empt 'smears'

Glenn Greenwald, the Guardian journalist who broke the news about the NSA surveillance program, has moved to pre-empt possible forthcoming reports from The New York Daily News and The New York Times that, he says, are part of an effort to smear his character.

In a new column, Greenwald says that reporters from both outlets contacted him on Wednesday, inquiring about IRS back payments. The Daily News reporter also asked Greenwald about his participation in an LLC that had an interest in adult video distribution, as well as a decade-old student loan default.

Greenwald said that he was expecting such inquiries since Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers, told him that the government used personal attacks to "distract from the revelations and personally smear the person with whatever they can find to make people uncomfortable with the disclosures." But he put little stock in the reporters' inquiries.

"So that's the big discovery: a corporate interest in adult videos (something the LLC shared with almost every hotel chain), fabricated emails, and some back taxes and other debt," he wrote. "I'm 46 years old and, like most people, have lived a complicated and varied adult life. I didn't manage my life from the age of 18 onward with the intention of being a Family Values US senator. My personal life, like pretty much everyone's, is complex and sometimes messy."

"If journalists really believe that, in response to the reporting I'm doing, these distractions about my past and personal life are a productive way to spend their time, then so be it," he concluded. "None of that — or anything else — will detain me even for an instant in continuing to report on what the NSA is doing in the dark."