Eli Jon Lake is an American journalist and the former senior national security correspondent for The Daily Beast and Newsweek. Currently, he is a columnist for the Bloomberg View. He has also contributed to CNN, Fox, CSPAN, Charlie Rose, the I Am Rapaport: Stereo Podcast and Bloggingheads.tv. Early life and education Lake was born in Philadelphia to a Jewish family and graduated from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1994. Career Lake began as national security reporter at the New York Sun and as State Department correspondent for United Press International (UPI). In 2011 at Newsweek/The Daily Beast, Lake reported on how the Obama administration sold Israel powerful bunker buster bombs. In 2012, reporting from Somalia, Lake found a local prison that received Somalis captured by the U.S. Navy and later disclosed how the United Nations documented U.S. violations of an arms embargo in Somalia to funding some of the regional governments there. Lake was one of the first reporters to challenge the Obama administration's initial claims in 2012 that the 9-11 anniversary attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi was not connected to al Qaeda. In 2013, Lake disclosed how court documents in the U.S. government challenge to Blackwater (now Academi) showed that the organization was an extension of the CIA after 9-11. He was a contributing editor for The New Republic between 2008 and 2013. Lake joined The Daily Beast following The New Republic as Senior National Security Correspondent. Lake along with his colleague Josh Rogin left The Daily Beast in October 2014 and joined Bloomberg View. Criticism Ken Silverstein, one of Lake's primary critics, has claimed his past sources lacked credibility and been used to manipulate the discourse on national security. Silverstein accused Lake's reporting of supporting WMDs prior to the invasion of Iraq. Silverstein cited an article that Lake had written in 2006 during the war in Iraq. In 2011, Silverstein wrote an article for Salon claiming that Lake's reporting on Georgia was biased because pro-Georgian lobbyists had paid for his meals and drinks in the past. This report was disputed by Ben Smith on Politico. Silverstein implied that Lake's relationship with these lobbyists influenced his original report of a bomb blast near the U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi. That story was confirmed by The New York Times. Both pieces come to the same conclusion that a Russian military intelligence officer was implicated by Georgian and U.S.