In 1993, Waas was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in the category of national reporting for more than a hundred stories that he wrote for the Los Angeles Times about the covert U.S. foreign policies of the Reagan and first Bush administrations leading up to the first U.S. war with Iraq. That same year, Waas also won Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School's Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. 

In 1993, he was a fellow with the Alicia Patterson Foundation, for whom he investigated neglect and abuse towards institutionalized citizens, including mentally retarded children, hte mentally ill,  the elderly, and juvenile offenders.  Articles Waas wrote on for his fellowship appeared in both the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post.

More recently, Murray Waas has been a contributing editor to the National Journal and a consulting investiative reporter for ABC News' Investigative unit. For both, he has reported about the use of prewar intelligence by the Bush administration to make the case to go to war with Iraq, the U.S. Attorney firings, the politicization of the Justice Department during the Bush administration, and other controversies regarding the Bush Justice Department.

Murray Waas began his journalism career as an investigative reporter for the late columnist Jack Anderson, when he 18 years old. Columns that Waas wrote with Anderson regarding U.S. corporations then doing business with the regime of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin have since been widely credited with helping bring about economic sanctions later imposed against the Amin regime by the U.S. government.

Early in his career Waas was also an investigative correspondent for the Village Voice, where he wrote about a dozen stories for the newspaper on everything ranging from investigative articles to essays on popular culture.  His reporting for the weekly newspapaer was cited by the American Journalism Review as a reason the magazine named the Vocie as the nation's top alternative newspaper.  He also reported for the newspaper dozens of original aricles about the Iran-contra affair and the tenure of Edwin Meese as then-President Ronald Reagan's Attorney General. 

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote in a 2006 profile of Waas in which he declared hat Waas was the "Woodward of Now":

It should be obvious from the work who the Woodward of Now is. And if it isn’t obvious Greg Sargent can explain it to you over at the American Prospect.

The guy’s name is Murray Waas; he’s an independent journalist who recently went to work as a staff writer for the National Journal...

By Woodward Now I mean the reporter who is actually doing what Woodward has a reputation for doing: finding, tracking, breaking into reportable parts—and then publishing—the biggest story in town. He’s also putting those parts together for us.

The Biggest Story in Town (almost a term of art in political Washington) is the one that would cause the biggest earthquake if the facts sealed inside it started coming out now. 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.

Another profile of Murray Waas which appeared in U.S. News & World Report by Elizabeth Halloran can be found here.

Halloran wrote:

Washington investigative journalist Murray Waas, 47, has been around awhile. As a teenager, he left George Washington University well shy of a political science degree to start his reporting career working for legendary muckraker Jack Anderson. And he's been ruffling official feathers since the Clinton Whitewater/Lewinsky imbroglio, when his stories on Salon.com took a prodigious swing at dismantling special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's $40 million investigation.

Yet the slightly disheveled Philly native has always managed to remain well under the public's radar – refusing to appear on television, toiling independently as a freelancer until recently joining the respected National Journal, and always working the phones and a network of sources from his Northwest Washington home.

But his cover's been blown. With the publication in recent months of his news-breaking stories on the Bush administration's involvement in manipulating prewar Iraq intelligence – particularly its attempt to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson and to out his CIA operative wife, Valerie Plame – Waas has gotten a sometimes bitter taste of what he refers to as his "five minutes of fame." He's now dealing not only with sources and editors but also pesky cable television bookers who never get the answer they want and new interest in his personal and professional life.

"I'll welcome my obscurity back. Obscurity is my natural state of being. I'm comfortable with it. And it's a great companion," says Waas. But his journalism will continue to draw attention to him. Waas's exhaustive National Journal stories on special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's inquiry into the leak of Plame's name to reporters has been praised by media critics and White House watchers – Jay Rosen of "PressThink" called him the new Bob Woodward, and columnist Dan Froomkin of WashingtonPost.com chided large media organizations for not acknowledging and following up on his disclosures.

Though Waas has been knocked a bit off balance by the bright light now shining on him, he says he wants to keep pushing "to really get to the bottom of how we got into the war – the prewar politics and whether the American people were told the truth." He shared more of his story last week over lunch in Georgetown.

 Asked by Halloran the reasons why he does not appear on televison, Waas answered:

There's not much of it that really enlightens us. There are journalists who don't do journalism anymore. They go on television; they're blogging; they're giving speeches; they're going to parties. And then at the end of the week they've had four or five hours devoted to journalism. TV takes time away from actual reporting. An acquaintance of mine, [Doonesbury cartoonist] Garry Trudeau, went a long time without going on TV, and we talked about having a 12-step program for people who appear on television too much. It would be a boom business in Washington. But Garry has lapses – he's been on Nightline, Charlie Rose... But I've been steadfast. I have not been broken. I thought it was me and Garry against the world, the two amigos. He's left me hanging out there.

Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz wrote about Waas in this April 17, 2006 profile:

After more than a quarter-century in the journalistic shadows, Murray Waas is finally getting his day in the sun.

The freelance investigative reporter has racked up a series of scoops. He's been cited by New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Paul Krugman. And New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen calls him the new Bob Woodward.

But Waas -- whose blog is called Whatever, Already -- doesn't toot his own horn very much and only reluctantly granted an interview. "My theory is, avoid the limelight, do what's important and leave your mark. . . . If my journalism has had impact, it has been because I have known to spend more time in county courthouses than greenrooms," Waas says.

When journalists are seen as pursuing stories to get "television appearances or million-dollar book contracts, it becomes much more difficult for us to play our role."...

Last year, Waas disclosed that Libby had told prosecutors that in 2003 he met with Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter, and told her about CIA operative Valerie Plame. Fitzgerald cited the Waas account in a letter to Libby's lawyer setting in motion the waiver ultimately springing Miller from jail on contempt charges.

Once a teenage legman for columnist Jack Anderson, Waas is intense andspeaks just above a whisper.  He also has a knack for prying information out of prosecutors, as he did during Kenneth Starr's probes of Bill Clinton. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993, with Douglas Frantz of the Los Angeles Times, for reporting on clandestine U.S. efforts in Iraq. Says Frantz, now the paper's managing editor: "He's a dogged reporter with an amazing capacity to obtain sensitive documents."

The Los Angeles Times' late Pulitzer Prize winning media critic, David Shaw, wrote this analysis in the fall of 1992 of Waas' reporting about covert U.S. foreign policy during the Reagan and first Bush administration leading up to our first war with Iraq.

In the summer of 1998, J.D. Lasica wrote this assessment of Waas' reporting about the Clinton impeachment sagain the American Journalism Review and which can be found here and said:

The Net is becoming an alternative channel for original, honest investigative journalism shut out of the mainstream press...

Salon's coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky matter — its first sustained foray into classic investigative journalism — has served as a counterweight to the mainstream news media's wolfpack mindset..

Among the print journalists writing for Salon on the Clinton investigation are Murray Waas, a former special correspondent for the Los Angeles Times who was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for coverage of the United States' Gulf War policy...

Waas says from his home in Washington: "I'm hardly a renegade by any means. If anything, the bar is raised much higher because you're going against the pack. It's strange: If you report accurately and truthfully, you get attacked. If you make a mistake with the herd — by reporting a semen-stained dress or nonexistent Secret Service agents who saw the president in a compromising position — there aren't consequences."

But it's Salon's investigative journalism that has raised old media's hackles because [Salon managine editor Andrew] Ross says, it was done the old-fashioned way: shoe leather, cultivating sources, working the phones — no new-media tricks here.... [Waas] writes for Salon, he says, because "I like the daily rhythm and the immediacy."

 

Matt Welch also crticiqued Waas' reporting on the Clinton impeachment for the Online Journalism Review that same year, writing:

Web-only journalism officially graduated to the Beltway's radar screen April 25, when Bill Clinton kicked off the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner by saying: "I just want to know one thing: How come there's no table for Salon Magazine?"

The president has good reason to stump for Salon these days. Thanks to the work of reporters Murray Waas and Jonathan Broder, Kenneth Starr's key Whitewater witness David Hale has suffered a serious blow to his credibility, and the independent counsel himself has been forced to fend off conflict-of-interest questions from the Justice Department.

A March 31, 2006 appraisal of his reporting regarding the misuse of prewar intelligence information by the second Bush administration to make the case to go to war with Iraq by Washington Post White House columnist Dan Froomkin--  and which can be read by clicking here-- said the following about his work:

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...

Collections of Waas' various articles can be found here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and at Sourcewatch.org.

In Nov. 2004, then-Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee named Waas an honorary citizen of his state and also officially appointed him as an Arkansas Traveler.  His earlier reporting on Huckabee for the Arkansas Times won 2002 honors from the Arkansas Press Associaation.  That reporting later garnered national attention when Huckabee ran for President in 2004.

In May, 2007, Murray Waas coedited with Jeff Lomonaco, "The United States v. I. Lewis Libby", published by Union Square Press.

Reviewing the book that same month in the Columbia Journalism Review, contributing editor James Boylan wrote:

Murray Waas, a disciple of Jack Anderson, the ultimate outsider, has assembled a plump volume of the trial and grand-jury records in the case of I. Lewis Libby, chief of staff to Vice President Cheney, convicted in March of obstruction of justice and lying in the case involving disclosure of the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. The transcripts make abundatly clear that Waas may have had less interest in Libby’s missteps than in the foibles of a cohort of Washington’s current insider journalists, among whom Tim Russert, Bob Woodward, Judith Miller (jailed for a time for refusing to testify), and Robert Novak (who first revealed Plame’s identity to the public), were the most celebrated. Their accounts of dealing with Libby and other members of the administration constitute an encyclopedia of insiderdom—the anonymous-source-concealment dance, the sometimes transparent charade of selective source protection, the willingness to be spun in exchange for access to power. 

In May, 2008, GQ Magazine named Waas as one of four of "The Best Reporters You Don't Know About."  They said of him:

"Years of groundbreaking watchdog journalism have resulted in this nickname for Murray Waas: the new Bob Woodward. His pieces on the Plame leaks and U.S. attorney firings inadvertently provided candidates with more ammunition against the current administration than any campaign strategist could hope for."

Murray Waas can be reached at murraywaas@gmail.com or through leaving a message on his Facebook page.