Days after Glenn Greenwald blasted Dean Baquet for being "subservient to the American national security state," a man who blew the whistle on AT&T told HuffPost Live about his own experience with what he described as Baquet's reluctance to publish damning information about the government.
Back in 2006, former AT&T employee Mark Klein revealed information that proved the communications giant was allowing the NSA to monitor Internet traffic "without any regard for the Fourth Amendment." Klein initially brought the story to The Los Angeles Times, but it never made it to print under Baquet, who recently replaced the fired Jill Abramson as executive editor of The New York Times.
Klein told HuffPost Live's Alyona Minkovski that he gave 120 pages of AT&T documents to an LA Times reporter who "was promising a big front-page expose" on the story. But the reporter eventually told Klein there was a "hangup," and the story was abandoned shortly after with no explanation.
Months later, producers from ABC's "Nightline" who were working on the story contacted editors at the LA Times to ask if they had, in fact, decided not to print it. The producers were told that Baquet killed the story, Klein said.
"That's when Dean Baquet came out with this lame excuse that he just couldn't figure out my technical documents, so he didn't think they had a story. I don't think anybody really believed that argument because, as I said, a few weeks after the LA Times killed the story, I went to The New York Times and they had no trouble figuring it out," Klein said.
Any question of the clarity in the documents Klein produced "was just Dean Baquet's lame cover story for capitulating to the government's threats," Klein alleged.
Baquet has denied the charges in the past, saying that he was not influenced by the government, but rather that he could not see the story in Klein's technical documents. The New York Times, however, did publish the information brought forth by Klein, who approached the newspaper after the LA Times.
See Klein's full explanation of his fight to expose the conduct of AT&T and the NSA in the video above.