The wife (Elise Jordan) of Rolling Stone journalist Michael Hastings, who was killed in what many people believe was a suspicious car crash last week, has vowed to “take down whoever did this,” according to the man who released an email in which Hastings told friends he was being harassed by the government.
Staff Sergeant Joseph Biggs, who yesterday told Fox News that Hastings was working on “the biggest story yet” about the CIA before his untimely death, was responsible for releasing an email Hastings wrote 15 hours before his car crash in which the journalist stated he was “onto a big story” and needed “to go off the rada[r] for a bit.”
Biggs tweeted that the reason he released the email was because Hastings’ other friends and colleagues who received it were “too scared” to do so.
After the email was released, Hastings’ wife Elise Jordan thanked Biggs and vowed to “take down whoever did this,” according to Biggs.
Biggs, who met Hastings when he was an embedded journalist in Afghanistan in 2008, added, “I won’t let a man die in vein [sic] because I’m too scared of what will happen to me. If I sent that email to Mike he wouldn’t rest, he would fight.”
In his interview with Fox News yesterday, Biggs also said that Hastings “drove like a grandma” and that it was totally out of character for him to be speeding in the early hours of the morning.
Earlier this week, former counter-terror czar under two different presidents Richard Clarke told the Huffington Post that the fatal crash of Hastings’ Mercedes C250 Coupe was “consistent with a car cyber attack.”
Hastings had made numerous powerful enemies as a result of his exposure of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal in 2010, receiving several death threats in the process.
According to Hastings’ colleague Cenk Uygur, the writer was, “incredibly tense and very worried, and was concerned that the government was looking in on his material,” and also a “nervous wreck” in response to the surveillance of journalists revealed by the AP phone tapping scandal and the NSA PRISM scandal.
BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith added that Hastings had told friends and family “he was concerned that he was under investigation.”
Another close friend who wishes to remain anonymous said that Hastings was “very paranoid that he was being watched by the FBI.”
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